Assisted Dying is just another name for Killing.
Written by: Melanie Phillips
Monday December 12 2022, 9.00pm, The Times
The Commons health and social care committee has launched an inquiry into “assisted dying” in England and Wales. The committee defines this as including both “physician-assisted suicide”, where a doctor prescribes lethal drugs for a patient to self-administer, and euthanasia, where healthcare professionals administer the fatal dose.
Over the past couple of decades, there have been numerous attempts to permit some form of physician-assisted death procurement, which have been defeated by the strength of the arguments against it. The committee says it will examine “different perspectives”, but euthanasia supporters clearly believe they now have the wind behind them. They may be correct.
Even Matt Hancock, the disgraced former health secretary, is getting in on the act by announcing he will be making a TV documentary on assisted dying. He compares it to the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the legalisation of gay marriage as just another milestone on the march of progress.
But it has been resisted for good reason. This is not to gainsay the dreadful suffering undergone by some people towards the end of their lives and their all too understandable wish to end it. That terrible fate could happen to any of us. So the accusation of heartlessness regularly hurled by campaigners at opponents of such a change in the law is very wide of the mark.
The change is opposed because of its likely downside in opening the floodgates to the inhuman treatment of extremely vulnerable people. They may come under pressure to end their lives by relatives who are either unscrupulous or simply unable themselves to cope with the pain and distress of seeing their loved ones suffer.
Campaigners also assume that the feelings of a sufferer won’t change. They accept as incontestable the perspective of that person — who may be suffering from a depression that makes them view life as hopeless — that their life really is hopeless.
Very sick people may well want to end their lives, sometimes because their care is inadequate — a situation likely to be exacerbated by the accelerating crisis in the NHS. But with better care and support they may discover a purpose in continuing to live.
In 2009, a motor neurone disease sufferer, Sarah Ezekiel, who could communicate only through a computer, observed that whereas once she wanted to be “put down” like an animal, better care helped her realise that she could have a productive life that would give her enjoyment and satisfaction.
And once the law was changed, where would this end? In 2014, the profoundly disabled Baroness Campbell of Surbiton warned: “Once society permits the deliberate procurement of someone’s death, all bets are off.”
In several countries where euthanasia has been legalised, people are being helped to end their lives simply because they aren’t receiving adequate treatment or are depressed. In Canada, which allows people with serious disabilities to choose to have their lives ended in the absence of any other medical issue, people have sought euthanasia because they aren’t getting adequate support to live.
One Canadian requested euthanasia simply because he had hearing loss. His horrified family protested after his death that he had lacked the capacity to understand, hadn’t been taking his medication or using his cochlear implant, and that hospital staffers had improperly helped him ask to be helped to end his life.
In Oregon, the law allows assisted suicide for patients with depression or other mental disturbance. Opponents say it has been extended to include cases of chronic illnesses, benign tumours and sometimes no reported illness at all. In Belgium, voluntary euthanasia has been extended to children at any age.
And who can forget that when Hancock was health secretary during the pandemic, widespread outrage forced him to order a halt to the blanket use of “do not resuscitate” decisions being applied to elderly and learning disabled people in care homes.
Yet there’s a swell of support for physician-procured death because of two things. The first is the unscrupulous campaign featuring stories of appalling suffering from terminal illness, a number of which have been distorted in order to terrify people. The second is the deeply cynical switch in terminology to “dying” to describe a process by which someone procures another person’s death. Dying happens to us all. Euthanasia or assisting someone to die are euphemisms for killing them or helping them kill themselves. But of course, the word “killing” has pretty lousy PR. That’s why the Voluntary Euthanasia Society cannily changed its name to the unchallengeable Dignity in Dying.
For such campaigners, the line between dying and killing is blurred. They reflect a culture that increasingly sees no intrinsic value to anything, including life. What matters to them instead is the value of the circumstances of a life. And they themselves are to be the arbiters of that value judgment, viewing another individual’s experience of his or her life through the prism of their own reaction, whether this is personal and emotional or callously utilitarian.
Hard cases make bad law; and linguistic legerdemain always indicates a corrupted project.
The legal barrier against euthanasia and assisted suicide is there for a purpose. It is a line in the sand that prevents us slipping into a culture of death-dealing. Crossing it would not produce a culture of compassion. It would brutalise an entire society.