Defeating the Culture of Death

“The high tide,” King Alfred cried. “The high tide and the turn!” This battle cry of Alfred the Great, as imagined by G.K. Chesterton in his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse, came to mind when the British Parliament inflicted a surprise defeat on the culture of death earlier this month.

The U.K.’s Parliament has overseen the rise of the death-culture for decades, its enactment of egregious laws contributing to the nation’s slow but sure sinking into the quagmire of its own suicidal decadence. It was a surprise to everyone, therefore, when Members of Parliament voted to reject the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, thereby preventing its being passed into law. After a passionate debate lasting four hours, 286 MPs voted to reject the bill, whereas 270 voted in its favor.

This was a shock. The French government had voted to legalize assisted suicide in July, following earlier decisions to legalize euthanasia by the governments of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Spain. It was considered a foregone conclusion that the British government would follow suit.

The surprise defeat of the dealers in death was largely due to the successful lobbying of Parliament by groups advocating rights for disabled people. It seems that the disabled, the sick, and the elderly are finally realizing that the cultural acceptance and legal enforcement of assisted suicide represent a threat to their right to life. Even government agencies have come to this obvious conclusion. The U.K.’s Department of Health and Social Care stated that the passing of the bill would have placed “subtle pressure” on disabled people to end their lives.

Disability rights advocates celebrated the vote as a “victory” for the disabled, the terminally ill, and for “everyone this bill would have put at risk.” A spokesman for Assist Us To Live, “a collective of disabled and terminally ill people campaigning for our lives,” thanked the Members of Parliament who had voted against the bill and told the BBC that palliative care systems are “dangerously underfunded” and that disabled people “fight every day” for the “support to eat, wash, leave our homes, and work.”

Reading between the lines—or looking beneath the surface—of the push for legalized euthanasia, it is clear that the culture of death is itself growing old and tired and is unable to look after itself. Having pushed the contraceptive culture and having promoted systemic infanticide of children in the womb, the death-culture has seen the plummeting of birth rates and the consequent aging of the population. There are fewer young people to support the burgeoning number of old people. Once the final solution to the “problem” of fertility is solved through the killing of children, it’s only a matter of time before the culling of the elderly becomes an economic necessity. This is the culture of death’s other “final solution” to the problems it has itself created.

Once assisted suicide is accepted by a culture, it will soon be expected that those who are a burden on society, who are not able to contribute economically and are a drain on resources due to the health care they need, will seek the “assistance” needed to end their lives. “Assistance” becomes expectation and coercion—and, finally, coercion becomes compulsion. Those who do not have the financial resources to pay for their medical and health needs will be sentenced to “assisted” death.

In such a scenario, the only people who will see their natural deaths in old age will be the rich, who can afford to keep themselves alive with the care they need, and those who have raised children lovingly, who will be looked after by their children and grandchildren. This is the inevitable consequence of abandoning the dignity of the human person through the pursuit of economic prosperity. When man is reduced to being merely homo-economicus, one who exists solely to serve the economy as a producer and consumer of wealth, he will be discarded as soon as he is no longer economically viable.

At long last, it seems that the elderly and disabled are beginning to see the writing on the wall. They are beginning to understand that they will have to fight for the right to live; they will have to fight for the right to life. Those who fight for the right to life are declaring war on the culture of death. Might we hope indeed that the surprising victory for life in the British Parliament is the high tide and the turn.