For me, the grimmest thing about today’s ‘assisted dying’ debate in the House of Commons was when MPs emitted an audible groan upon hearing about Canada’s state-sanctioned killing of the wretched. It was the Conservative MP Danny Kruger who had the temerity to mention these unfortunates put to death by their own government. He referred to ‘medics’ in Canada, who are ‘specialists in assisted death’, who ‘personally kill hundreds of patients a year’. A collective whine shook the chamber as MPs were confronted with the truth of what they were voting for: the right of state-approved bodies to slay certain members of the public. ‘If honourable members have a difficulty with the language’, Kruger shot back, ‘then I wonder what they’re doing here’.
The groan spoke volumes. With their eye-rolling, our lawmakers exposed how utterly out of touch they are with the strife of the sick and poor who have indeed been killed – yes, killed – in Canada. They have so uncritically bought into the shadowy, euphemistic lingo about a ‘right to die’ that they appear to have forgotten that it involves the literal killing of a person on the basis that his or her life, in the state’s eyes, is miserable and ludicrous. Under Canada’s regime of death, this has included killing people who are not even terminally ill but who simply have ‘unmet social needs’, such as a lack of housing or of future prospects. Sorry for boring you by mentioning that poor people are being put to death under the very banner of ‘assisted dying’ you just pushed through the Commons.
The moan of the MPs was a sign of what was to come: following what was by all accounts a thin debate, MPs voted by 330 to 275 in favour of the bill to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales. After just five hours – shorter than the debates some of us have with mates in the pub – a majority of MPs said ‘aye’ to Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This doesn’t mean the bill will become law. There will be months of parliamentary scrutiny. But it does mean the bill has cleared a major hurdle. It does mean we’re on the road to a new, misnamed ‘health’ regime in which terminally ill adults expected to die within six months will be permitted to seek the state’s assistance in hurrying them off this mortal coil. It does mean we’re a step closer to people being able to apply for and receive the state’s assistance in taking their own lives.
This is a dark day for England and Wales. For this bill, if enacted, would represent one of the most sinister overhaulings of the relationship between the state and the citizen of modern times. It would grant the state dominion over life and death itself. It would give the powers-that-be the awesome and frankly terrifying power to decree which lives are worth living, and thus must not be ended, and which lives are so pitiable that not only should their ending be permitted but actively facilitated. Scrape away all the florid cries about ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’, about the ‘right’ to a ‘good death’, and what we have here is the technocratic class giving a Nero-style thumbs up to lives worth living, and a Nero-style thumbs down to lives judged so tragic and despicable that death is surely preferable.
The most offensive thing is the packaging of this regime of death as a brand new freedom, as ‘choice’. In truth, what we will get is a Byzantine system in which doctors, judges and politicians will become gods ruling over who may live and who might die. Let’s leave to one side the fact that some people who are given six months to live end up living for longer than that. And that sometimes people feel utterly bereft and even suicidal upon receiving a diagnosis of terminal sickness but then later come to cherish every last second of life. More important even than these profoundly human truths is the question of what message it will send to society if the state decrees that some lives are so awful that the people living them may receive a lethal prescription of poison from state-approved bodies.
The message it will send is that some lives have less moral worth, less inherent virtue, than others. That some people are such a burden – whether to themselves or their families or society – that they perhaps should be killed. That the very ill are more deserving of death than the rest of us. It seems unquestionable to me that the so-called right to die, this bourgeois cult of death, is yet another expression of the depressive anti-humanism of our age. Everywhere you look, humanity is damned as burdensome. Burdensome to the planet, to the economy, to the NHS. We hear about the ‘ageing timebomb’, the human ‘plague’, the ‘human footprint’. Anyone who thinks the elite handwringing over terminally ill adults can be neatly separated from this broader social dread of onerous humanity is naïve at best, and complicit at worst. The only difference with the ‘right to die’ is that our rulers won’t only be lamenting supposedly troublesome lives this time, but taking an active role in their ending.
We will live in a very different country if this bill goes through. In fact, it feels like we already do. That a majority of our MPs seem more zealous about ending difficult lives than they are about improving the NHS and palliative care terrifies me. This is up there with lockdown and the ceaseless war on Brexit as proof of the aloofness of a ruling class that clearly understands little and cares even less for the lives of the people it rules. If your solution to social problems is death, then you have no business overseeing social problems. Those of us who always err on the side of life, who think every human life has value, must speak up. And loudly.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
The moan of the MPs was a sign of what was to come: following what was by all accounts a thin debate, MPs voted by 330 to 275 in favour of the bill to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales. After just five hours – shorter than the debates some of us have with mates in the pub – a majority of MPs said ‘aye’ to Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This doesn’t mean the bill will become law. There will be months of parliamentary scrutiny. But it does mean the bill has cleared a major hurdle. It does mean we’re on the road to a new, misnamed ‘health’ regime in which terminally ill adults expected to die within six months will be permitted to seek the state’s assistance in hurrying them off this mortal coil. It does mean we’re a step closer to people being able to apply for and receive the state’s assistance in taking their own lives.
This is a dark day for England and Wales. For this bill, if enacted, would represent one of the most sinister overhaulings of the relationship between the state and the citizen of modern times. It would grant the state dominion over life and death itself. It would give the powers-that-be the awesome and frankly terrifying power to decree which lives are worth living, and thus must not be ended, and which lives are so pitiable that not only should their ending be permitted but actively facilitated. Scrape away all the florid cries about ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’, about the ‘right’ to a ‘good death’, and what we have here is the technocratic class giving a Nero-style thumbs up to lives worth living, and a Nero-style thumbs down to lives judged so tragic and despicable that death is surely preferable.
The most offensive thing is the packaging of this regime of death as a brand new freedom, as ‘choice’. In truth, what we will get is a Byzantine system in which doctors, judges and politicians will become gods ruling over who may live and who might die. Let’s leave to one side the fact that some people who are given six months to live end up living for longer than that. And that sometimes people feel utterly bereft and even suicidal upon receiving a diagnosis of terminal sickness but then later come to cherish every last second of life. More important even than these profoundly human truths is the question of what message it will send to society if the state decrees that some lives are so awful that the people living them may receive a lethal prescription of poison from state-approved bodies.
The message it will send is that some lives have less moral worth, less inherent virtue, than others. That some people are such a burden – whether to themselves or their families or society – that they perhaps should be killed. That the very ill are more deserving of death than the rest of us. It seems unquestionable to me that the so-called right to die, this bourgeois cult of death, is yet another expression of the depressive anti-humanism of our age. Everywhere you look, humanity is damned as burdensome. Burdensome to the planet, to the economy, to the NHS. We hear about the ‘ageing timebomb’, the human ‘plague’, the ‘human footprint’. Anyone who thinks the elite handwringing over terminally ill adults can be neatly separated from this broader social dread of onerous humanity is naïve at best, and complicit at worst. The only difference with the ‘right to die’ is that our rulers won’t only be lamenting supposedly troublesome lives this time, but taking an active role in their ending.
We will live in a very different country if this bill goes through. In fact, it feels like we already do. That a majority of our MPs seem more zealous about ending difficult lives than they are about improving the NHS and palliative care terrifies me. This is up there with lockdown and the ceaseless war on Brexit as proof of the aloofness of a ruling class that clearly understands little and cares even less for the lives of the people it rules. If your solution to social problems is death, then you have no business overseeing social problems. Those of us who always err on the side of life, who think every human life has value, must speak up. And loudly.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
7 comments:
"In truth, what we will get is a Byzantine system in which doctors, judges and politicians will become gods ruling over who may live and who might die."
Legally assisted death is the power being vested in the individual to choose, albeit in tightly (and rightly) prescribed circumstances. O'Neill inverts this.
My home country (Holland) has very liberal euthanasia laws. I have great difficulty is seeing the issue from this writer's point of view as we see it as a matter of self-determination and choice. "Those of us who..... think every human life has value" should not be able to impose their value structure on the rest of us. There is only one person on the planet who decides whether MY life still has value and you are talking to him.
Brendan, yours is an example of claiming the opposite of what is obviously the case. You are not alone; it pervades the findings of the Waitangi Tribunal. It confirms that humans are only partially rational and that we still have some way to go. Euthanasia is problematic, but we need a better debate than this.
He's got this one wrong. I suspect hes allowing his religious convictions overshadow reason.
So the author defends the right of those to say what they want, but wants to control them doing what they want.
Interesting how people can justify two such extreme sides in their own minds. Yet fire off if someone does the same thing.
There is a difference between the UK and NZ on this. NZ had a referendum and the Government was given a mandate by the people. The UK Government has proposed this via a Private Members Bill and possibly was not even in their manifesto.
Sorry Brendan, this article reads as irrational hogwash. Life is cheap in many countries, but generally that isn’t the case in your example (Canada) or other Western nations. Seriously considered caveats are in place, for good reason.
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