A quick note to record my dismay and sorrow at the passing through its second reading in the House of Commons of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill last Friday, 29th November, by 330 votes to 275. Although the Bill is not yet law, it suddenly brings us alarmingly close to permitting assisted suicide in this country for the first time.
I know that many of the Bill’s supporters are motivated by a just desire to alleviate suffering, but the ease with which assisted suicide has been alighted upon as the answer — as opposed to improved palliative care, or sustained maintenance of health provision — is alarming. The slippery slope, though a cliché, is perfectly real, and there are appalling stories from Canada and the Low Countries about euthanasia being granted on the grounds of treatable or manageable conditions such as depression or anorexia — and of its being extended to children. Campaigners for disabled people are understandably alarmed by and fiercely opposed to the Bill, and worried about its likely effect on social attitudes.
There is also, as ever, an emphasis on the idea of dying ‘with dignity’: on our own terms, within our own control, while sentient and in possession of our faculties. This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of the secular society that we are building, but it fails to perceive the wisdom of the older, Christian vision that we are losing: that our human dignity has a deeper, firmer, more reliable foundation than we readily perceive; that it is not diminished one jot by suffering or infirmity. The fading of this belief will have consequences graver than our leaders now realise.
Robert Jenrick MP put it like this:
My last point is not about how we can improve the Bill; it is about something that we can never resolve as a House. The Bill is not so much a slippery slope as a cliff edge. When we walk out of this Chamber, or out of the gates of this building tonight, we will, in a way, walk into a different country if the Bill passes. There will be different conversations around kitchen tables. There will be different conversations had by couples lying in bed at night, or on quiet country walks where people talk about difficult things. They will not be conversations that make our country a better place.
More important, there will be people who do not speak about these things at all. There will be imperceptible changes in behaviours. There will be the grandmother who worries about her grandchildren’s inheritance if she does not end her life. There will be the widow who relies on the kindness of strangers who worries — it preys on her conscience. There will be people — we all know them in our lives — who are shy, who have low self-esteem, who have demons within them. I know those people. I can see them in my mind’s eye. They are often poor. They are vulnerable. They are the weakest in our society. And they look to us, to Parliament, to represent them, to support them, to protect them. In their interests, I am going to vote against the Bill today. Sometimes we must fetter our freedoms. We the competent, the capable, the informed sometimes must put the most vulnerable in society first.
Once again I feel this sense of a great cheapening of everything around us: of language, of our sense of the value of human life, of the bonds of duty and of love that exist between us. The journalist Tim Stanley quoted a ‘very clever’ friend of his who pointed out that the Bill divides the ‘libertarians from the conservatives and the progressives from the socialists’. Certainly, the proponents of the Bill seem as keen on promoting individual liberty as on lessening suffering: the idea that we must always be able live life on our own terms, even to the point of death, seems to come foremost. That so many of our political leaders seem to believe human life to be negotiable or mutable at its end, as well as its beginning, is profoundly dismaying.
I am very grateful to my own MP for having voted against this Bill, as she has against similar Bills in the past. And the Catholic Church, led from the front by Cardinal Nichols, has upheld the sanctity of life very strongly. It has been pointed out that that a significant number of MPs were undecided when they voted ‘Aye’, wanting to have a longer debate, and that only twenty-eight MPs need to change their minds at the Third Reading for the bill to fail. It is to be hoped and prayed for that this comes to pass.
Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth has put things very frankly, in a pastoral message to his diocese:
This legislation […] makes one thing crystal clear. Britain is no longer a Christian country. To be a Christian in future will not be easy, if ever it was. More and more, as in ages past, we will stand out from the crowd and from others in our society who see human life, its dignity and value, in a radically different way.
It is my hope that God will give us the grace to live our discipleship ever more authentically so that the true beauty of our Catholic faith might become even more evident. I pray that the splendor veritatis, the beauty of the Truth, the hope it gives, especially to the vulnerable, and the Gospel vision of the human person — fallen but redeemed, an incarnate spirit called to live a good life here on earth and one day to be with God for ever in Paradise — will shine out for all to see.
Prayer, then, that the Bill will fall in favour of greater care of the sick and dying, and for courage in any case. And please write to your M.P.!
Sir James MacMillan: the Kyrie from his 2000 setting of the Mass, sung by the choir of Westminster Cathedral under Martin Baker.
