24-12: The Assisted Suicide Bill: The Thin End of the Wedge?

Hello. For this month’s vlog, I thought I would probably discuss the assisted dying or assisted suicide bill which passed its first round of voting on Friday. The state explicitly assisting someone to die medically is a first in our lifetime, and is something faith leaders have been very concerned about.

It is an emotional topic, and it is not black and white. You know, one feels sympathy, probably more than mere sympathy for those who are in great pain due to illness and wish for it not to continue.

Ethics isn’t simple however, and the reality of political decisions is anything but simple. It is an instructive example of where noble and compassionate sentiments can nonetheless lead to terrible outcomes the promoters of the bill say they never intended.

Jonathan Sumption, the prominent former justice of the Supreme Court, is a supporter of the principle that people should be able to terminate their own life if they are in great suffering. But he says people like him “must recognise that it will bring real dangers to some people as well as real benefits to others.” And he points out that “having crossed a significant moral barrier there will be less to restrain us when people start to campaign for a looser test, as they inevitably will.”

Canada introduced assisted dying in 2016 for adults with a terminal illness like the plan is here, but this was inevitably extended in 2021 to people with no terminal illness and the disabled. And in 2027, anyone with a serious mental health problem will also be eligible.

Sumption adds that the bill that MPs voted for on Friday “contains a number of provisions designed to ensure that patients are not ‘pressured by any other person’ into taking their own lives. The real problem, however, is not the pressure applied by ‘other persons’. It is assumptions which many old and ill people spontaneously make about the attitudes of society around them. They are afraid of being an emotional or financial burden.”

My grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and I know that when she first came to live with us her overwhelming fear was that she was being a burden to us, because she kept saying it. And bluntly she was very difficult to live with in those first 6 months. Actually probably for the first year. In that sense she was a burden. But a burden we willingly carried because we loved her and she’s family. And things did get better and our relationship improved immensely. How awful if she had been taken from us before we had had the chance to continue our relationship as a family, even though in a different form.

This is just one example, and only my experience, so it cannot be used to justify a whole debate, but I hope it explains something of where I’m coming from, and why I instinctively worry that we are wilfully ignoring that the proposed bill “will bring real dangers to some people as well as real benefits to others.”

And I would argue that the law as it currently operates de facto allows for the fact that some family members hasten their loved ones’ death in a way that the law does not specifically allow but in practice tolerates. The numbers involved are small and in each recent case they have not been prosecuted. The law here acts with mercy in the face of loving mercy.

In Canada the argument is now that people in serious medical conditions need help with their condition, not help to die. The state’s focus is skewed away from palliative care. As a country “We need to give hope.” Ultimately may we have faith to entrust the process of the bill’s procedure through parliament into the hands of God’s tender care, and pray that the right outcome will result. And may we be enabled to have hope, for ourselves and as a country, at this time as we approach Christmas.

Amen.

The Rev’d Michael Aylmer, St Mary Magdalene Enfield, December 2024