Tag Archives: ethics

THE LONG MARCH OF PROGRESSIVISM

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There was something depressingly inevitable about the progress towards the legalising of assisted suicide. The details of the bill now published only confirms this. The list of robust safeguards “the strictest in the whole world” will be enough to win over the doubters and get the bill through the process and into law. The message is clear. This is no slippery slope. We will not be following Canada or the Netherlands, where mental health and even homelessness are justified reasons for ending lives. We will not be coercing doctors to be involved and there will be stringent legal sanctions against any who flout these measures. We have the most rigorous safeguards in place.

We all know, of course, how safeguards have worked out in the past. They never seem to be as safe as they are purported to be. The slide down the slippery slope is almost certain. Safeguards are useful in getting the thing over the line, but once there, they have served their purpose and can be dispensed with at will. That too is inevitable. 

Once the law is in place, you can be sure, different groups who will be excluded under the safeguards, will lobby justifiably so, for the law to be changed to cover their own circumstances. It would be unfair to those who expect to live longer than the legal nine months and whose suffering is prolonged. It would be inequitable to exclude the mentally ill. It would be unreasonable to exclude parents of children who are seriously disabled who are themselves unable to express their own suffering. It is almost as if the more robust the safeguards are, the easier they will be to circumvented.

Is that cynical alarmism? I don’t think so. The abortion act of 1967 was brought in to deal with a small number of difficult cases with robust safeguards in place. Since then, over 10 million lives have been legally destroyed and we hardly give it a thought, almost fourteen thousand in one year (2021) in Scotland alone. These precious vulnerable little beautiful lives are not even worthy of silent prayer.

This is how it works out and this is where progressiveness leads: the liquidation of the unborn, the dismantling of marriage and the family, the denial of biology, the culling of the old and sick and, and finally, the destruction of humanity itself.  Life is just another human construct, after all.  Arguing against it now seems futile.

We had a senior palliative care doctor speak to our home group on the vexed issue, a few months ago. While she was deeply troubled by the proposed change in the law and wholly against it, she felt that as a clinician she could not use her religious beliefs in a debate. The argument had to be made on other grounds to be accepted as valid. Interestingly this was the same position that Danny Kruger took in what was an excellent debate with Christine Jardine on Channel 4 https://www.channel4.com/news/mps-go-head-to-head-in-assisted-dying-debate. If Christian medics feel that they can’t argue from a Christian view of life, for fear that it would not be taken seriously and politicians can’t argue from their own deeply held religious views, then the cause is already lost. Danny Kruger almost admitted that in the interview.

How then can you object, if your religious beliefs carry no weight in the secular world?  What can you do when the battle is already lost and won?

Well, I remember, very clearly, a conversation I had with our Slovakian house guest, several years ago. She was with us for a year and early on in her stay she was puzzled by a controversy that was blowing up in the church. It was to do with the appointment of ministers who were living in openly same-sex adulterous relationships. I tried to explain the situation as openly and fairly as I could, detailing both sides of the argument (the traditional and the progressive) and how each took their authority from scripture. She was quiet. So, I asked innocently “What do you think?” She turned and looked at me with an expression I will never forget. It was a mixture of shock, unbelief and barely concealed hostility. “It is wrong!” was her vehement reply.

I know that this attitude wouldn’t get far in the current debate.  But, and here is the point, some issues, I am convinced, should not be up for debate. We should not be discussing whether the state should sponsor the killing of those who are ill. It is wrong. Life is not a human construct. Life is a gift, a precious gift from God.  We did not choose it and we did not buy it. We did not decide to born, we did not decide where or when or to which parents and no human institution has the authority to sanction its ending. 

Assisting suicide is wrong. It may be inevitable but it is still wrong.

THAT’S LIFE

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Now that the leader of the opposition, our prime minister in waiting, has given his support, and a national treasure has told her own personal story, the passing of new legislation to allow for assisted suicide is becoming almost inevitable. It will be yet another assault on our battered humanity. Of course, it will be dressed up in the caring, loving, emotion tugging language we have grown accustomed to, but whatever arguments are offered, however it is spun, it will be nothing less that state sanctioned killing.

It has always been this way. The powers that be, wait their time till bit by bit, drip by drip, nudge by nudge with the useful help of the arts, drama and the media community with personal sad stories, finally bring the reluctant reactionary population round to their way of thinking.  Ideas which only last Saturday were seen as quite ridiculous, bizarre, and belonging to the stage in comedy and farce, can be made to work, when a determined elite put their minds to it. There is something almost predictable about it. It was so with abortion on demand, same sex marriage and transgenderism.

With Euthanasia, the current step, is the call for a fresh debate. It is some years now since the UK parliament last debated the motion. That was back in 2015, when it was roundly defeated, but the mood has changed, we are told, and many are coming round to a more liberal and progressive view on this deeply controversial subject. There is a feeling that a fresh cohort of members of parliament, following a general election, would take a more enlightened view. For the moment, the call is simple. We need a fresh debate and who can be against that? Well, I can and I am. It is not something we should debate. The matter has been settled and it has been settled for thousands of years. The state has no authority to sanction killing other than in the very narrow parameters of administering justice or involvement in a just war.  It is the classic Judeo-Christian principle upon which so much of our civilisation is based.

Many will accept a debate and argue against any change to the law on the principle that it would be the slippery slope to all sorts of killing which would so easily seep through the net.  Safeguards, no matter how robust, have an uncanny albitite to be, in reality, quite weak. It will be easier to dispatch the elderly who feel they have become a burden, easier for young people who have become disillusioned with life to be assisted to end it and easier for people who can’t get affordable housing to find another way out.  All valid arguments, and based on solid evidence no doubt, but I am against it, simply because it is wrong.

Life is not something we invented. It is not a human construct. We did not choose when, where, how or to whom we were born. life is a gift. We didn’t make it, or craft it or purchase it. We owe everything to its creator and to try deny this, to usurp the maker’s authority by making ourselves gods, deciding when our life is completed is foolishness in the extreme. It is like the pot arguing with the potter, who made it. A picture that the prophet Isaiah so aptly used.  

It is a sad fact, a desperately sad fact that suicides are commonplace in our society and possibly most of us will have had a close encounter with one or more. It takes the breath away from you in the way nothing else does, because it strikes at the very core of our humanity, putting into question the very reason for our existence. It is impossible to conceive of the desperate pain that brings a person to this point and the pain that it delivers to those who loved them. Who can possibly be in a position to judge the rightness of any individual’s actions in these situations? That can only be a matter between them and their creator, but for the state to sanction the taking of life, it would fly in the face of all of this and cut at the very heart of our humanity.

Esther Rantzen’s daughter was right when she said that if her mother was to board a plane for Zurich, she would ground it.  It wouldn’t be up for discussion and that’s life.