If you are from an international audience reading this blog you may not have heard of Debbie Purdy. If you follow the news on the cause of ‘assisted dying’ however you will have heard of her because she has made her mark indelibly in the minds of Brits involved in this argument. Debbie Purdy has just died at the very young age of 51 and was a long term sufferer from primary progressive MS. She had just spent a year in the Marie Curie Hospice in Bradford where she had sometimes refused food. She has spent her years of illness and undoubted heartache to campaign for the right for a person to be able to be assisted in taking their own life if they no longer wish to put up with unbearable circumstances associated with a debilitating disease. She was particularly concerned that her partner could be prosecuted by the existing law for assisting her through compassionate reasons to take her own life.

This has been a significant issue in the UK as a steady trickle of people with terminal or incurable illnesses have been going to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to end their lives. Should people helping them in any way to fulfil their wishes be criminalised by the courts? Debbie Purdy succeeded in taking her fight to the very highest courts in the land and forcing the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) to clarify the legislation by writing out a list of particular circumstances which should be considered over a prosecution concerning someone’s assisted dying.

Given that the default position of western society is so often personal peace and affluence you can understand that the way has been prepared for strongly emotive arguments to be made in support of any and every way possible to make our lives, and deaths, as easy and pain free as possible. No other generation has had so many opportunities to minimise the physical discomfort that life throws at us. Why should we allow unnecessary suffering if we can find a quick and painless way of overcoming it?

You had to have every sympathy for Debbie in her plight. A young woman of great energy and vitality reduced to a shadow of herself by a cruel illness. What comes over is that she was a woman of remarkable strength and conviction, extremely strong minded to the extent that she was determined to force the authorities to change the law in her favour and in favour of others in a similar plight. However is it a good idea for one person with extremely strong convictions over a particular issue to force a change in the law that will affect potentially the whole population not necessarily in a positive way? It is sometimes said that hard cases make bad law. Is this an example of that?

‘Assisted dying’ is another one of those euphemisms, and this time it’s not a very well disguised alternative expression for assisted suicide. It has traditionally been the accepted mind-set that suicide either assisted or otherwise is wrong. Why? Some would argue that it is part of the Judeo Christian framework on which our society is based, that all human beings are created in the image of God and that precludes self-destruction or assisted self-destruction. It is killing, whichever way you look at it, and the job of a physician looking after you is to sustain life and not to take it.

In such a framework, given the nature of the human predicament, is it better for the law to have a stern face with an edge of compassion, that is to maintain the present law, so as to discourage any illegitimate taking of life, but at the same time allowing doctors to use their common sense and discretion in end of life situations. That way there’s wisdom in minimising the potential for human beings to take advantage of other people for spurious or sinister purposes, and maximising the importance of the sanctity of life and that there are some things that we really have no right to take.

In view of the prevailing culture, the desire to live a pain free existence and to minimise suffering, and with the medical knowledge to make this possible, it is entirely understandable that arguments for assisted suicide have gained credence, especially when relatives have witnessed the awful and distressing suffering of loved ones. I remember my old Headmaster saying that by the time he was old he hoped that they would have invented a pill that you get to take to quietly slip away.

The framework that used to dominate our lives, and was in effect almost unquestioned, was the framework set by that Judeo Christian culture. But now people have jettisoned that culture and replaced it with a human rights culture. This begs the question is there such a thing as right and wrong, of rigid principles that should not be rooted out, or has the human rights culture enabled us to move towards an evolving understanding of what it means to be human? So there are no absolutes and no fixed reference point such as a divine nature that governs the affairs of men. Human rights can evolve as we become more enlightened as you might say.

So the argument has become that you should have a human right to take your own life if you so wish. After all, it is your body so don’t you have a right to deal with it as you wish? Human rights culture has opened the way to extreme individualism, so how far do we allow human rights to go?

The sanctity of life as we have understood it in a Judeo Christian framework is now being squeezed inexorably from both ends of the human life cycle. Abortion, a highly emotive subject is seen as killing of the unborn by the pro-life movement, but a perfectly legitimate lifestyle choice for women who have a human right as to how they choose to use their own body. Evidently the right to an abortion over rides the right to life of the unborn. So the right to take a life at one end is now being complemented by the right to take a life at the other end, whether you choose to do it yourself or someone else helps you do it. One wonders how long it will be before we argue for the right to take a life at any age in between. Oh, hold on, there was the case of the Belgian twins this last year who argued for the right to take their own lives which they argued were no longer worth living. Born deaf, they found out that they were going blind and would never see one another again. This they could not bear, and were killed by Belgian doctors after seeking euthanasia. At the age of 45! Days after the twins were killed the Belgian government, socialists incidentally, tabled a legal amendment allowing the euthanasia of children and Alzheimer’s sufferers. Is this the way we want to go?
We are now living in an age where people could potentially argue for the right to die for all sorts of reasons, not just terminal illness or unbearable pain, at any age, from any class, intelligence or income level or background. The Belgian twins saw nothing to live for, desperately sad in view of their impending blindness. What would the Belgian authorities say to a person who no longer wanted to live because they were unhappy with their appearance, they considered themselves not clever enough, they felt depressed despite being young and physically fit, they had suffered a lot of rejection, they just didn’t enjoy life anymore, their financial troubles were too great, and so on? This is the prevailing atmosphere now in western culture, although laws are different in different countries and are certainly not yet in the UK at the stage found in Belgium or the Netherlands.
There is now a very strong movement in Parliament to pass an Assisted Dying Bill so that people such as Debbie Purdy will no longer have to agonise over whether a loved one will be prosecuted over their assistance of a loved one to commit suicide. Notice that change in the language again, killing or suicide will now be called ‘assisted dying.’ So the agreement of two doctors will guarantee that you go ahead with the full support of the law. Even churchmen and women will support this, including notably Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

Proponents of assisted suicide might not like being reminded that when abortion was legalised in 1967 the signature of two doctors was needed for an abortion to take place. Abortion was apparently designed at the time for extreme circumstances when the mother’s life was at risk, but since then abortion has morphed into abortion on demand where we have even had proposals for women being allowed to have an abortion without a doctor properly considering their case and the diabolical practice of sex selective abortions. Those who sneer at the slippery slope argument may be on a slippery slope with their own arguments.

One thing to remember is that all cases of arguments for new ‘human rights’ affect other people. To successfully argue that you have a human right in a particular area you need to show that giving of such a right will not harm other people. None of us lives in a vacuum. What you do or say affects those around you.

Now it may be that in your particular situation a beloved relative will on compassionate grounds help you fulfil the wishes you have so vehemently argued for. However I am by no means persuaded that giving people the right to take their own life will be good for society as a whole. There seems to be a certain naivety about human nature in some of the discussion. Unfortunately not all motives for ensuring that somebody dies are entirely altruistic. One can easily envisage situations where pressure will be put on people to do away with themselves because of ‘strains on families or loved ones,’ when all sorts of sinister motives, pecuniary and otherwise could be dredged up to subtly manipulate, bully and control people in vulnerable positions. It is worth bearing in mind that perhaps the most powerful negative spirit we all face in our daily lives generally, in family, work, social situations and so on is the spirit of control, manipulation and intimidation that can operate through other people who believe they are higher up the pecking order, continually trying to press us into a mould made for us by other people. That spirit has much to take advantage of in end of life situations.

My conclusion to this is that we tamper with laws like this at our peril, and what we stand to lose will be much more than what we stand to gain. The protection of wider society, the poor, ill, vulnerable and weak especially, is far more important than deference to the minority of hard cases that are continually trumpeted in the media.