The Culture of Death Wins in Britain

In a brilliant essay in The London Times, Lord Jonathan Sumption, former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, voiced his chagrin about the victory for a law permitting assisted suicide in Great Britain, which won a comfortable margin of votes in the British Parliament. His analysis should serve as a warning for us and a preparation for a debate which will occur here.

Lord Sumption wrote, “The rival camps of Friday’s debate on the assisted dying bill can at least agree on one thing: the decision to allow doctors to help bring about the death of a human being crosses a major moral threshold.” Those of us in the pro-life movement know that the threshold had already been crossed when abortion was legalized. Abortion is also “the death of a human being.”

However, it is clear that assisted suicide (a word never used in the bill for obvious reasons) is another sign of the rising immorality in Western society. Sumption declares, “The sanctity of life is an almost universal social instinct, common to all civilized societies, to all developed legal systems and to people of all faiths or none.” The euphemisms bandied about in the argument for assisted suicide were an attempt to “soften the impact of this change” respecting the life of persons even despite those wishing to destroy themselves. Prior to this bill, assisting someone in suicide was always a crime. Now it is not a crime when it has been given a state sanction.

The mechanics envisioned by the bill are more than a little awkward. According to the former justice: 

A person wishing to “end their [sic] life,” will be able to initiate an elaborate process involving several statutory declarations and three successive doctors, two of them with special qualifications decided by the secretary of state. Finally, a High Court judge must give the go-ahead. A doctor will then hand the patient an “approved substance” (viz, a lethal poison) and stand by while he or she dies.

This is some kind of dystopian nightmare. Rightly, Sumption points out what he called a bureaucratized approach to the ultimate human reality, death. Three doctors have to sign on to the crime: two who are specially trained to approve self-destruction and then another who must give the person poison and wait until he or she dies! This is the work of a physician? Insuring the poison works? Doctor Kevorkian, thou should have lived to see this hour!  

Sumption does not turn to theology to explain his disquiet about this legal breakthrough of the culture of death. He admits that two principles are at war here: that of the sanctity of life and that of the autonomy or freedom of the individual. What he rightly fears is what he calls a “progressive normalization” of suicide, its acceptance as “an available exit route.”

The bill has so-called safeguards against people feeling pressured to end their lives. Supposedly, it applies only to those who have only six months to live. Six months according to whom? Two relatives of mine were forced to leave a hospice because they had outlived the time limit of six months. The hospice could only legally keep people for that long. If they lived longer, they had to go to a standard nursing home facility. 

The legal structure envisioned by the bill also gave Sumption pause. 

In particular, it requires the whole process to be authorized by a judge. It is not clear from the bill whether the judge’s function tis limited to checking that the statutory procedures have been followed, thus adding lustre and prestige to a decision already made by others; or whether the judges will be required to duplicate the work of the doctors by forming their own view. If the former, the procedure is pointless; if the latter, it will cause delay and expense without necessarily improving outcomes. 

In other words, what if the judge decides that no, assisted suicide is not allowed in a case, against the will of those involved? Respect for the sanctity of human life might be affirmed, but the whole process would become an issue of judicial process.

Sumption is afraid that some people might feel pressured to end their life, even by their so-called loved ones. He finds it rather chilling that the promoter of the bill “has suggested that the sense of being a burden is a perfectly acceptable reason for wishing to kill oneself.” He is worried about the “low self-esteem” of the elderly and infirm, which is really society’s fault for its “cruelly negative perception of sickness and old age and its habit of outsourcing familial care duties that would once have been accepted as a matter of course.” “Utilitarian attitudes to life” are the source of so much of the perception of “being a burden.”

I see this not only as a question of British society. We cannot pretend that there would be little support for assisted suicide in our country, often by people who want to sound compassionate and use sentimental language of respecting the wishes of loved ones, some of whom are probably aware that the people around them want them to die. No pressure there?

No one wants to prolong dying, but some health-care workers seem to want to hasten it. A priest friend of mine was very ill and a nurse in a Catholic institution asked that he be put on hospice care within the facility. I asked whether such care involved cutting him off from the medicine he had been taking for his heart for twenty years. Yes, said the nurse, there was no need for him to continue the medicine. But wouldn’t that stop his heart and be like a plan to end his life? Why would a medicine he was taking for so many years now be regarded as some kind of extraordinary measure? I have been told since that not all hospice programs would have insisted on that, but I am still glad that I refused to allow the priest to be put on that protocol.

I am sometimes afraid that euthanasia is happening in our country under a multitude of circumlocutions. This is not usually by the will of the patient wanting an “escape route” but by health-care workers who go beyond allowing death to take its course to guaranteeing its promptness. Perhaps the victory of assisted suicide in Great Britain can help us awaken to the culture of what Sumption called the “negative perceptions” of illness and old age. He pointed out that part of that was the “outsourcing” of “familial care duties” by “fragmented families.” This will resonate with many who have visited nursing facilities where old people are cared for by strangers and rarely visited by friends and family. Death might be not only the “easy way out” for some patients but also a matter of convenience for some of their family members. 

Sumption concludes his essay by decrying “impersonalized death, squeezing true humanity out.” The impersonality of a bureaucratic decision in an institution, protected by societal acceptance, becomes a way of relinquishing responsibility. Radical procedures can be cloaked in “humane” cliches that make them sound right and a matter of course. We should not underestimate the dangers implicit in any society’s acceptance of state-sanctioned euthanasia. The “breakthrough” of assisted suicide is something to beware.