Harold Shipman wasn’t as keen on bumping off vulnerable people as the average member of Britain’s euthanasia lobby. Not that I’m comparing assisted suicide supporters to a serial killer, though returning to the scene of the crime is textbook psycho behaviour. The lobby is going back to the Commons with the exact same bill that fell in April. Their objective is obvious: get MPs to pass the legislation a second time to neuter scrutiny from the Lords.
The upper house expressed doubts about the previous bill on the grounds that its sponsor was a simpleton and her safeguards were so shonky that even Anatoly Dyatlov would have raised an eyebrow. This Parliament Act gambit reflects the lobby’s obsession with getting this grisly practice on the statute books and their utter disregard for constitutional niceties.
Kim Leadbeater having proved a less than effective agent for Euthanasia Inc., they have chosen another Labour MP as the face of their renewed effort. Her name doesn’t matter all that much. She’s the MP for Rochester and Strood, so she’ll be losing to Reform in a couple of years’ time, and she’s decided that her legacy in public service will be a private member’s bill allowing the NHS to dole out killer drugs to desperate people. If you’re going to dream, dream big.
In reviving the previous bill, the lobby makes clear its disregard for the safety concerns raised in the Lords. The potential for coercion, for the disabled to feel a burden, for financially-motivated children to get rid of a parent, or for an abusive husband to engineer the ultimate form of domestic violence. They care not a jot that their legislation would give the authority to prescribe suicide drugs to a healthcare bureaucracy that makes 237 million medication errors every year, causing or contributing to 1,708 deaths. They want assisted suicide to be legal and they are icily indifferent to the consequences for the poor, the disabled and the vulnerable.
Why? Without getting lost in the weeds of moral philosophy, what is being pushed alongside this bill is autonomy-maximising individualism, the idea that politics should be oriented to guaranteeing choice in all matters regardless of social, moral, practical or economic consequences. It is a philosophy in which the highest good is the feeding of the ego and the articulation of the self the only telos that matters. It is the toddler’s tantrum carried into adulthood and raised to a political ethic. The word ‘no’ evokes the same response from the euthanasia enthusiast as it does the bloke demanding the right to self-identify as a woman or the couple who insist on acquiring a child by surrogacy.
If the British have a religion it is live-and-let-live-ism.
That might sound harsh, and it is. If the British have a religion it is live-and-let-live-ism. If someone wants to do or be something so badly, they should be allowed to make up their own mind. No one else’s morals, and particularly those grounded in faith, should be allowed to deny them their choice. But we know that no man is an island and that legislation to meet one person’s wish for autonomy applies to everyone else too, including those who don’t wish to make the same choice, those at risk of being coerced into actions they would otherwise resist, and those who will suffer the unintended consequences of impetuously tearing down centuries-old moral and ethical guardrails which are centuries-old for a reason. When the autonomy in question is the ability to end life itself, interrogating the moral and practical impacts becomes all the more imperative.
For those of us who believe that life is sacred, that murder is murder, and that the state healthcare system should not become a licensed dealer of fatal overdoses, assisted suicide is morally inadmissible. However, there are people of good conscience who see things differently and believe there are circumstances in which the law should permit medics to help their patients kill themselves. These are the people who should insist on a more rigorous legislative process than the euthanasia lobby is prepared to concede. That lobby doesn’t want to get assisted suicide right, it just wants to get it legal.
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