Assisted Dying in a 'Christian Country'?

Lord Falconer, Chairman of the Commission on Assisted Dying

This morning a "Commission on Assisted Dying,"chaired by Lord Falconer (pictured), and funded entirely by people who believe that the state ought to permit people to be aided to take their own life, has reported today, perhaps unsurprisingly given that a number of bodies opposed to assisted dying (and the BMA!) refused to take part because of the way the commission was put together, that the law ought to be changed to allow people over 18 who have been judged by two doctors to have less than 12 months to live and are capable of taking the medicines themselves to be aided in their desire to end their own lives.

The main reason for their conclusions, as it has been reported, is that the current legal position is "inadequate, incoherent and should not continue." This seems to me a remarkable conclusion because in fact the law is very clear - the 1961 Suicide Act provides that assisting a suicide is illegal. However last year the Director of Public Prosecutions issued guidance that in some circumstances people would not be prosecuted for helping someone to die even though what they had done remained technically illegal (i.e. the law would not be repealed, it simply wouldn't be enforced). If this guidance was revoked so that the law was enforced the commission's problem of an "incoherent" law would disappear.

So why people be opposed to assisted dying? Here are just a a few brief reasons...

a) We all know that good doctors are reluctant to predict either the length of someone's remaining life with a serious illness or the quality of that life because these things are massively variable. Such legislation would put terrible pressure on them to give dates without good medical evidence other than "averages" - and who would really want people to kill themselves based on an average?

b) The legislation provides that people must be 'mentally capable' before being allowed assisted dying. Speaking for myself I'm not sure that anyone who has recently been diagnosed with a fatal illness or told their treatment has failed so they cannot be cured is really in a good place to make that decision. Many of us fear incapacity or being a burden; but many people go on to find even those last months and weeks when they need huge nursing help very precious parts of their life.

c) If significant numbers of people who have diseases which kill in particularly unpleasant ways choose assisted dying it will, inevitably, reduce investment and interest in palliative care for those illnesses. That will lead to a worse end of life for those who do not choose assisted dying and, likely, pressure on those people to just take the killing drugs as 'that's what most people do'.

d) The "safeguards" look remarkably like those provided for the Abortion Act of 1967 - signature of two doctors, limited circumstances in which abortion would be permitted. There what was envisaged as legalising perhaps a few thousand abortions a year to save lives turned into a tidal wave of over 180,000 babies a year being killed. This is not a road we ought to be travelling.

e) For me as a Christian the most powerful reason for thinking this would be bad legislation is that it gives the wrong view of freedom. To be human is not to be free to do as we like, especially not with something as precious as human life. God is quite clear in his Word that giving and taking life are his job and that, except where he has clearly revealed in the Bible that taking life is permitted, it isn't. This is not a new or 'evangelical' doctrine - it's something that almost every Christian in every denomination throughout 2,000 years of church history has agreed about.

Perhaps rightly the Ministry of Justice has responded to the Commission by saying that this is not a party political issues and that the Government has no policy on it - any change in the law would be left to individual MPs.

But if ever there was an issue on which a Prime Minister who has recently described himself as a "committed" Christian living in a "Christian country" could come out and make a statement that the vast, vast majority of Christian people would agree with it would be that assisted dying is a bad policy that will lead to bad consequences for vulnerable people and which is profoundly not Christian in any way.

You can also read Peter Saunders' excellent blog post on the flaws in the Commission's report here.