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November 24, 2024 - 4:15pm
If you’ve travelled on the London Underground recently, you have probably seen the posters supporting Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End Of Life) Bill, which will be debated in Parliament on Friday. They are very slick and professional, as you would expect from an extremely well-funded group such as Dignity in Dying. The posters are especially prominent at Westminster tube station, which is heavily used by MPs and peers and their staff (you can enter the Palace of Westminster complex directly from the station).
The posters feature mostly young and healthy people stressing how much they want to have choice at the end of life, alluding in some cases to terrible experiences undergone by relatives. The problem, of course, is that these are mere catchphrases. “Choice at the end of life” and “my dying wish is my family won’t see me suffer and I won’t have to” are among the most anodyne motherhood-and-apple-pie slogans imaginable. Parliamentarians should not be deceived by mere clichés about choice, which deliberately obfuscate the matter at hand, muddling people about the options currently available. It is hardly surprising that, according to new polling, almost two thirds of British voters support assisted dying.
The intention is clearly to make people who do not know much about end-of-life care — a large majority of the population — assume that without assisted suicide, we are all at high risk of an unpleasant death, pointlessly prolonged by dogmatic vitalist medical professionals. But this is not the case. British palliative care is some of the best in the world, and patients already have the right to refuse medical interventions. It is a well-established principle of good medical ethics that doctors can, in some circumstances, discontinue or not initiate treatments which are futile and burdensome. In the case of unresponsive patients, doctors can and do make reasonable decisions with families about how best to proceed. Contrary to the myth-making of Dignity in Dying, British hospital wards are not full of patients being miserably kept alive against their will by hard-hearted medical professionals.
“Choice” is a slippery concept in itself. In 2022, Canadian clothing retailer Simons released a schmaltzy pro-euthanasia TV advert featuring Jennyfer Hatch, a woman in her late-thirties who had chosen to die under Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) programme. But the advert was quickly withdrawn when it became known that Hatch had been unable to find appropriate healthcare for her Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. “I feel like I’m falling through the cracks so if I’m not able to access healthcare am I then able to access death care?” she had stated.
This story has been replicated hundreds of times not only under the Canadian MAiD regime, but in the Netherlands and Belgium too. People with depression or chronic illness, people with severe disabilities who cannot access support, people who are “tired of life”: all have ended up having their lives ended. Ostensibly, they have chosen to do so, but the very availability of death as an option changes the game, because it forms our expectations and assumptions about how people should behave in particular situations.
A disability rights campaigner once explained it to me this way: if the default is that no one can be intentionally killed, even with their consent, then no one has to defend their decision to go on living. But if assisted suicide becomes an option, then those who feel themselves to be a burden constantly have to justify their continued existence. It is also true that with constant cost pressures on the NHS and social care, the availability of assisted suicide must inevitably affect the calculations of those who decide on resource allocation. After all, good end-of-life care is expensive.
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SubscribeSo they use the vigour of youth to sell death. Truly a cheap, nasty advertising campaign. The creators of the ads may be the first to make money on assisted dying. I’m sure there are many more opportunities to follow. A pox on everyone involved.
What is the guarantee that the poison will always give a quick, painless death in 100% of suicides? That doctors and judge will always detect the malign influence of greedy beneficiaries, malicious relatives or, indeed, of an exhausted carer? That doctors and judges are competent to do so?
What’s the evidence that good hospice care can’t control pain?
Why is state sanctioned medical staff assisting at suicides preferable to building and maintaining more hospices?
If one argument is that the majority want assisted suicide, why isn’t capital punishment on the statute books?
Do a majority want capital punishment?
Law is meant to minimise the abuses of freedom, without becoming abusive of freedom itself, or opening up more paths to abuse than it closes? These advertisements portentously already seem to abuse freedom.
Who asked us, the people? Government killing of the people as a service, WTF? All the fuss about mental health services , why not just kill them , why waste money , they’re long term depressed and claiming benefits?
You may have missed it but there was an election earlier this year.
You lost.
It wasn’t won with a majority of the vote (34%), so it hardly represents the wishes of the people.
Let’s have a referendum then.
https://petition.parliament.uk/signatures/145827753/verify?token=941YQwXfYbyixqJcAD6e
You lost.
Everybody lost
Brilliant.
This is a private members bill with a free vote for Labour MPs; so nobody voted for or against this in the last election. I know you don’t read replies after you have posted but you make yourself look more stupid with every post.
Have a referendum. Solve everything.
If Keir Starmer proposes to “get Britain working”, then what does he think that Britain does now? And who will administer these schemes of his and Liz Kendall’s? BlackRock? Our rulers’ corporate paymasters crave the bonded labour that they intend to supply.
As to the sick and disabled, unlike the Health Secretary and the Justice Secretary, Starmer and Kendall both support killing by the NHS on the authority of a judge, so we can all see where their thinking leads. Moreover, Wes Streeting agrees with them about NHS privatisation, so another payday is coming. Companies do not not make political donations. They make investments, on which they expect a return.
A petition is not going to bring about another General Election, but what if it did? How would one vote against all of this? If one meaningfully could not, then what would be the point?
https://petition.parliament.uk/signatures/145827753/verify?token=941YQwXfYbyixqJcAD6e
Polls show that 70% of people support it. Also suck it up, you lost.
Both the Health Secretary and the Justice Secretary are opposed to the Bill that would allow the NHS to kill people on the authority of a judge. They should both say that they would resign if it became law. At the very least, that would prevent it from receiving government time, without which no Private Member’s Bill could ever hope to reach the Statute Book.
In Canada a similar bill that was passed has led to assisted suicide being offered to people suffering from depression.
These are darkening times.
Many of those I hear approving of and advocating for assisted suicide seem to be more occupied with the idea that they might be denied a right to it, rather than the realities involved. If it is legalised, how long will it be before someone who is refused it goes to court claiming discrimination, thus engaging the matter with other laws along the ‘slippery slope?’ Not long, I’m sure. Meanwhile, we keep hearing the equivalent of, “Mum…Mum, I want an assisted death…Mum! Everyone’s getting one…please, Mum, please….
It is difficult to know whether you will need an assisted death. I mean, you might drop dead of a heart attack, and the question becomes moot. However, being able to have an assisted death if required seems a fundamental right to lots of people.
As so often happens, the activist organizations have over stepped. These ads should not have been released. They’re grotesque.
But the real interesting question that comes to mind is this: How many of the opponents of such a program are going to change their minds when it’s their turn? Intense, un-treatable pain with the certainty that it’s going to get worse and could go on for years…Years spent bed-ridden in some grim institution at the mercy of under-paid people who don’t even like you…Watching all the things that were meaningful to you fade away; your joy de vivre, the companionship of family and friends, the wind and the sun and the rain…
Maybe the opponents should just mind their own business. Your own demise; mercifully quick or agonizingly slow, is racing up on you faster than you imagine.
That lady’s really excited to die. I can’t get that excited about anything anymore. You think that qualifies me to come to the UK to die under this new law?
“Taking the Tube? Have You Considered Killing Yourself Instead?”
That is absurd! That is not an “either/or” choice! You can take the tube now, and kill yourself later!
I don’t see what the problem is here and why we should need to try to restrict free speech (which is the clear implication of the first part of this article).
There needs to be proper public debate. And advertisting is just one part of that in a free country. Attempts at censorship (implied by another awful clickbait UnHerd title) are no way to try to win a debate.
There’s nothing stopping the interest group the author supports putting their alternative views forward (well, there shouldn’t be, but in the case of Tube advertisments, this may not actually be the case – but there are countless other opportunities to put their views across).
I fully agree. What the author leaves out is far more important than what he chooses to present. If palliative care was all its cracked up to be, there would be no need for debate, or this bill. The fact is, it can’t help those people with intractable pain or breathing difficulties which leads them to a protracted suffocation over days/weeks witnessed by their loved ones, unable to help due to fear of prosecution. Those who oppose this bill would change their minds if subject to this circumstance.
I hope they aren’t, as with anyone whose facile comments which would deny the right to end ones own life with dignity. Argue if you wish – that’s the reality.
There’s no dignity in suicide. I’ve seen it firsthand. It’s the ultimate act of nihilism, making your own flesh grass. There’s no beauty in it and people who project dignity and beauty into it make me sick.
Of course, you’re always welcome to take the long way home.
Death is not a home
There’s not much dignity in dementia, double incontinence, the slow, inexorable growth of cancer, of Aids, Ebola, and many others, but god seems happy enough to inflict them all, indignity or otherwise, on millions.
Death is ugly in all its forms, especially suicide.
You either believe in God or you don’t. If you do then your position is for the sanctity of life, if you don’t then stop claiming that God seems happy to inflict pain on people.
It was venerated in many cultures.
‘Niall Gooch is a public sector worker and occasional writer who lives in Kent.’ He’s also a fervent Catholic who writes for the Catholic Herald, and Spectator, among others, so is writing as a religious reactionary. While trying to conceal the fact.
If you want to criticise what he says, you should present the arguments that you disagree with, and explain why he might be wrong. Attempting to dismiss his views merely because they are Catholic is a smear tactic, the hope being that rejection, not pursuit of the argument, will result by those who fear imposition. People can have beliefs that match those of the Catholic Church without being religious, and deserve to be given a full picture, so they can decide for themselves.
I think the criticism is that there is no mention of the fact that he is Catholic in the article.