Britain Must Reject Radical Bill to Legalize Assisted Suicide
This Thanksgiving week, one of the most portentous debates on assisted suicide is pending in the English Parliament, as the House of Commons prepares for a second reading of a bill called the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. As the official summary of the bill states, it would “allow adults aged 18 and over, who have mental capacity, are terminally ill and are in the final six months of their life, to request assistance from a doctor to end their life.” The parliamentary action is scheduled for this Friday, November 29.
The bill as proposed contains “safeguards” that advocates say will limit abuse of the law or expansion of what the summary cleverly says might be a “slippery scope.” The bill requires that two doctors certify separately, a week apart, that the candidate for assisted suicide is a legal resident of England or Wales (no suicide tourism), that the individual’s condition meets the six-month time frame laid out in the bill, and that there is no pressure or coercion on the patient to request suicide. The measure also indicates that the substance to end the individual’s life be self-administered. Before that step can be taken, approval for the deed must be secured from a designated English court.
These provisions have been added to prior versions of this legislation in an attempt to allay criticisms that those proposals were unacceptably loose. The last time that Parliament considered one of those measures was nearly a decade ago, and it was defeated by a healthy margin of 330 to 118. The chief sponsor for the new bill is Labour Member of Parliament (MP) Kim Leadbeater. The 2015 bill called the Assisted Dying Bill was helmed by Lord Falconer, a name that might call to mind the opening lines of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” which looks with dread to a future where the “falcon cannot hear the falconer” and “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
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On this side of the Atlantic, assisted suicide remains a hot topic, and for some of the same reasons that the new debate is raging in Great Britain. For all of the effort to keep coercion and pressure to the side, a trio of nations — Canada, England, and the United States — face social challenges of their own making. The Labour Party has indicated that the Leadbeater bill is a “free vote” — one on which individual members are not bound by a party position and may vote in line with their conscience. Still more subtle, and perhaps more potent, forms of pressure prevail. To varying degrees, the Western nations engaged most strenuously in this debate are under duress. They feature historically low birth rates, a swell of older population, and rising health care costs borne to an ever-greater degree by government.
In an op-ed published in The Telegraph last month, two leaders in the campaign against assisted suicide, Baroness Finlay of Llandaff and Professor Julian C. Hughes, argued, “It is said that the eligibility criteria will protect the vulnerable. Yet, on the grounds of equality the criteria tend to expand. To say, as some do, that we have not seen this in Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands and so on, is preposterous: you can find assisted suicide and euthanasia for young women with severe anorexia, children, people with dementia, those with physical and intellectual disabilities. The evidence is legion.” They point as well to concerns that the network of hospices for the dying in Britain is badly underfunded and that this too will contribute to pressure to choose assisted suicide as a supposed cost-saving measure.
MP Leadbeater argues that a domestic option is needed in part because of the cost of travel to utilize legal assisted suicide in Switzerland and the difficulty in accessing it if a person is too ill to travel. The inventor of the controversial Sarco suicide pod, Dr. Phillip Nitschke, has helpfully suggested that, if the bill passes, he will bring his pod to England. A jewel of modern technology, the pod is a 3D-printed machine that ends the life of the occupant when it is flooded with nitrogen gas.
The case of an American woman who died in the Sarco pod in September drew recent interest when it was reported that her body bore “strangulation marks” when the pod was opened in a remote Swedish wood. St. John’s/Oxford professor of law and constitutional government Richard Ekins opined recently that the way is open to approval of the Sarco pod if the Leadbeater bill is adopted and the U.K. Secretary of State approves liquid nitrogen as a legal substance to induce death. Needless to say, the displacement of the iconic red telephone kiosk with the blue Sarco suicide pod as a symbol of English culture would be a sorrowful sight.
Oxford-trained ethicist and physician Dr. Calum Miller has cited the history of the abortion debate in Great Britain to predict the likely consequence of the Terminally Ill Adults Bill. In 2007, 40 years after the adoption of the Abortion Act, its prime sponsor Lord Steel lamented that abortion was being used “as a form of contraception in Britain … and he never anticipated ‘anything like’ the current number of terminations when leading the campaign for reform.” Dr. Miller says the fact that Steel “now supports the State Suicide Service bill is a chilling red flag — we know exactly how bad his foresight is!”
Sometimes the grade of the slippery slope is least noticed by those a good way down it. Europe can observe the expansion of assisted suicide in the Netherlands and Belgium, where people whose deaths were not imminent, the mentally ill, and children have been subjected to the practice. They can look to Canada, whose national health care policy was proposed as a means to ensure all people get care but whose cost has instead spurred assisted suicide and euthanasia advocates to press their cause. Public resistance has stalled expansion of what the government calls MAID, Medical Aid in Dying, for the mentally ill until March 2027, but the slope remains, despite new protests from citizens who suffer from depression and desire care, not killing. Legal scholar Wesley Smith, who has led efforts against these policies for decades, notes how they have gained a “utilitarian impetus” by being conjoined with organ donation.
Advocates for these laws point to opinion polls in Canada and England that show three-quarters or more of the populace support assisted suicide. As much as anything, polls like these illustrate the danger of policies that begin with limited application, proceed to wider criteria, then assume the features of public benefit, then collapse into a duty to die. The experience of organized euthanasia in Europe traces a century back, in the high-watermark era of eugenics, an experience with which modern Europe has still not truly grappled. A recent article by Canadian scholar Amanda Achtman at Public Discourse details where the notion of medically assisted death led in an advanced European nation. Her account of visits to these institutions, now museums of death, is a must read. There were castles among the camps.
How will this Friday’s vote play out? The debate has been robust and in the open. The “free vote” status is helpful in the English parliamentary system. Encouraging as well is the roster of current government officials who have spoken and written against the Leadbeater bill. The array of Labour Party leaders expressing opposition or promising to vote against the bill in the Commons is impressive. It includes former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the current Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Disabled People Minister Sir Stephen Timms, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and others, including Liberal Democrat and Sir Ed Davey and Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage, who said, “I look at the way assisted suicide is taking place in Canada and frankly, it gives me the shivers.”
November 29 is deemed Black Friday in the United States, as the Christmas shopping season is said to open. May it prove to be a Bright Friday in London with the rejection of this dark measure.
LifeNews Note: Chuck Donovan is a 50-year veteran of the national debate over the right to life and served from 1981-89 as a writer in the Reagan White House.He is the former Executive Vice President of Family Research Council.
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