The biggest question of all in the campaign to introduce a law to allow assisted suicide/euthanasia is simple: should what one person wants be passed into law for everybody?
There is no doubt that some people suffer at the end of their lives. We understand that, and have many examples in our own lives – disabled people too, have loved ones, relatives and friends and direct experience of suffering. We are neither immune to it in our own lives nor wish to ignore it in others.
But we still feel that a law is both the wrong response to that suffering and brings dangers so wide and deep that they must be resisted at all costs.
The introduction of a law to allow assisted suicide/euthanasia must involve a radically different way of thinking about people – all people. There is no choice about this change of mind-set because it is inherent, it is right there in the changes this law would bring.
A law to introduce assisted suicide/euthanasia would therefore mean that some people will be counted as ‘good to continue’ (living) while others are seen as appropriate subjects to have their lives ended. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this decision will be taken by other people.
That is the fundamental shift which arrives in a society with a law to allow assisted suicide/euthanasia, which we want to resist. It is abhorrent thinking and even if it is already present in some people, it is not backed up by a law in the UK. We shudder to think that it ever should be.
Allowing assisted suicide/euthanasia doesn’t just send the message, ‘it’s better to be dead than sick or disabled’, it makes it ok – it validates the idea, reinforces it and human nature is such that once a law is passed, many will move without any deep reflection to accepting it. That widening of the attitude will make it seem more and more commonplace, and that is where the greatest dangers lie for disabled people – they will automatically be considered as appropriate subjects for consideration of assisted suicide/euthanasia and a number of people will think ‘that’s ok’. Some of the most chilling words in a long report full of them, from the Falconer ‘commission’, were the reported position of Dr Adrian Tookman:
…[who] did not give his opinion on the rights or wrongs of assisted dying but said, ‘Personally if society said it was the right thing to do, I would have no problem supporting my patients through that process.’
I so hope this is a misrepresentation of Dr Tookman’s actual position which I suspect is far more complex, but at face value, it shows just how easy it is for people to give over responsibility for thinking about deep moral questions like this one, to a nameless, faceless ‘society’. The fundamental shift we are speaking about takes many forms and this one would be common enough, no doubt, amongst people who have no direct contact or requirement to think deeply about the matter of assisted suicide/euthanasia. But if a doctor might take that stance, how many more lay people will do exactly the same?
Even if the word ‘society’ really referred to something tangible, it is the worst kind of lazy thinking to simply suggest that ‘I won’t take a moral position myself. I’ll let others decide my moral position and follow their lead if it gets into law.’ I find this so chilling especially because of the echoes of history which boom around it, which is why I hope it really is a misrepresentation.
Not only does this put disabled or sick people at risk, it also changes their status as human beings while they are alive. At root of this way of thinking is the belief that some lives are not worth living, and that some people are entitled to make that judgement about the lives of others, and act upon it.
Non-disabled people, who have none of the lived experience of disabled people, find it too easy for them to view ‘so-called quality of life’ from their own perspective, treating life as a disabled person as a disaster, filled with suffering and frustration, as inferior, or as a burden on society. In fact, some disabled people also fall into this trap too.
It’s a form of the same trap that allows some people to say that society should prevent ‘defective’ people from having children. Or that anyone who can be considered by them, the non-disabled, as ‘a burden on society’, should be eliminated.
We are disabled people and we don’t agree:
- All people should have equal rights and opportunities to live well and disabled people should have the right to all necessary support to do so, not live in fear of being eliminated/killed
- Most disabled people enjoy living and despite the hard cases where some don’t that includes many people with locked-in syndrome
- Many non-disabled people don’t enjoy living, but no-one is threatening them
- The notion of measuring the ‘quality of a person’s life’ is nonsense and dangerous nonsense, especially when judged by those who consider themselves to have a life worth living by comparison to those others
- Proper support should be the first option including the best palliative care available at the end of life
- Medical prognosis about the expected term of the end of someone’s life is notoriously unreliable, and cannot be given accurate time-limits
There are many other reasons to go along with these….
To introduce a law to allow assisted suicide/euthanasia is to invite catastrophe and disabled people will be in the frontline. It is impossible that any who examines the evidence from Holland, Belgium, Oregon and all that has happened especially in our recent 20th century history, could be anything but clear about the dangers and particularly to disabled people.
(I don’t propose to rehearse all that evidence here – it is available online at the click of a button in many places.)
There are other big questions: some of them will be examined in later postings here on the Not Dead Yet UK website.