Politicians twist words and abuse language to ‘make lies sound truthful and murder respectable’, said George Orwell. That has never rang more true than it does today. In the House of Commons this afternoon, MPs spoke in deceitful tongues to make suicide sound attractive and death sound liberal. They voted to legalise what they call ‘assisted dying’, but which I think we should call state-sanctioned suicide. For strip away all the linguistic trickery about a ‘right to die’ and what we are left with is a new regime of state-appointed death merchants who will have the power not only to propose self-destruction to the ill, but to facilitate it, too.
Make no mistake, this is a dark day for Britain. MPs voted by 314 to 291 to pass the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This is the private members’ bill, spearheaded by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, that will empower the state to aid and abet the destruction of lives judged to be less good or less happy than others. It applies to England and Wales. It will permit sick people who are expected to die within six months to get ‘medical assistance’ to end their lives. To be eligible for this state-sanctioned suicide, you must be over 18, have mental capacity and get the agreement of two doctors, seven days apart. Then the state will give you poison to bring about your death.
Ms Leadbeater and her supporters big up the bill’s ‘safeguards’. They insist the law will not be a slippery slope to a culture of death, to self-obliteration as a consumer choice for the merely sad or dejected. It’s about ‘assisting’ the terminally ill only, they say. Yet even on this front, its flaws are glaring. Doctors are often wrong when they estimate how long the sick have left. You might be given six months but get two years. What’s more, people often feel suicidal upon receiving a terminal diagnosis, but then reflect and change and come to cherish the time they have left. This law, unquestionably, would lead to the state-faciliated deaths of people who had so much more living to do.
All the technical blather about ‘safeguards’ distracts us from the profound moral questions thrown up by the bill. Let’s be clear: this law would represent one of the most dramatic and destructive overhauls of the relationship between the state and the individual that we have ever seen. Overnight we would transform from a society that seeks to prevent suicide into one that facilitates it. The health service, once proudly devoted to saving life, would now be charged with ending life in certain circumstances. The Hippocratic cry of ‘First do no harm’ would lie in tatters, replaced by a new deathly creed: ‘Do no harm, unless they’re very sick, in which case maybe kill them?’
Hellbound and Down 