The U.K. debate about medically assisted suicide involves a certain denial of the true state of humanity.
A few weeks ago, the debate about medically assisted suicide was taken up again in the House of Lords. On the side of life, former Prime Minister Theresa May spoke humbly and elegantly. She worried that the bill legalizing “assisted death” puts the government’s endorsement behind the idea that some lives aren’t worth living, that permission for assisted suicide via the National Health Service will cause people to be “pressurized” to end their lives, merely “because they feel they are a burden on others.” She noted that in countries where there is such a provision, there is radical pressure to expand access beyond the small group who qualify for it in the first place. “Suicide is wrong,” she said, “but this bill effectively says suicide is okay.”
The most notable proponent for the bill was the great conservative historian Andrew Roberts, who summoned a moral urgency in saying, “Future generations will consider us monsters for stopping people from shortening their death agonies if they wish to.” He said that the bill gave them an opportunity to effect “the greatest alleviation of pain and suffering since Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.” And he spat on what he called the “medieval and sadistic” ideal, “the so called sanctity of life” that would forbid euthanasia. Instead, he commended us to “the Greeks and the Romans [who] recognized that there was nothing ignoble in it if the alternative is far worse.”
Longtime readers will know that I’m with May, not Roberts. Roberts argued that “the autonomy to die on one’s own terms should not be denied any longer,” but why is death the subject of one’s own choice, let alone autonomous? I did not choose when I was born either, or what my family would be. Half the debate comes down to whether anyone really is “autonomous” when they have a terminal diagnosis, and especially when their treatment options are being outlined and rationed by others.
Roberts is right that “autonomy” is at the heart of the debate. We see that in the report in the New York Times that the famous Canadian children’s author, Robert Munsch, facing a future of dementia and Parkinson’s disease, has decided upon medical assistance in dying. Canada has already dramatically expanded legal euthanasia beyond the relatively arbitrary six-months-to-live prognosis. He feels trapped because he still has faculties sharp enough to clearly give consent now, but in the future, he may not. He doesn’t want to “be a lump.”
Munsch’s case is precisely why the parameters of legal suicide always rapidly expand. Despite Roberts’s invocation of a final agony, most people in such a state do not ask for help killing themselves. They ask for pain medicines and for the presence of loved ones. Munsch is a much more typical example when you study the assisted suicides in Canada and Denmark. He is not in a final agony, he simply dreads being dependent. He dreads the loss of autonomy. As Arlene Foster noted in her intervention in the Lords debate, since the Oregon Death with Dignity Act came into effect in 1998 until 2024, 46 percent of those who had chosen to end their lives, when asked for a reason, cited their feeling of being “a burden on family, and friends.”
One deeply fallacious line snuck into Andrew Roberts’s passionate case for assisted suicide. He said, “No amount of resources given to palliative care can alter the ultimate result, or abolish the fearful pain and indignity that terminally ill people have to go through.”
That’s true, but in such a trivial way. After all, no amount of care that I give healthy young children can alter the ultimate result: They will die. In these remarks, Roberts has incidentally confessed not his hatred of suffering, but something more like a denial of mortality and the true state of humanity, which is not fully “autonomous,” but social. Death and illness do inflict humiliations that pain us. But isn’t it funny that those of us who profess that “thou art dust, and to dust thou shall return” are the ones who would face those humiliations with heart, and hopefully with the help of our family and the support of our society? Roberts’s alternative amounts to the cold wish that one had offed themselves in advance since, he argued, life in such circumstances has “lost any possible meaning.”