If the polls are correct, Keir Starmer is likely to be elected as prime minister with a thumping majority. God help us.
It is not only the mad woke legislation that Starmer and crew will impose that we should be worried about; it is also Starmer’s promise that he will give MPs a free vote on legalising assisted suicide. Starmer is known for his changeability when it comes to policy but on this matter, he is solid as a granite fist.
In 2010, when he was director of public prosecutions, Starmer issued guidelines that discouraged people from being prosecuted for aiding a terminally ill person to kill him or herself. In 2015 as an MP, he voted in favour of assisted dying. More recently he promised broadcaster and stage four cancer patient Esther Rantzen that if he were elected as prime minister, he would go ahead with a free vote.
Starmer has caught the public mood because according to a YouGov poll in 2023, 76% of the population thinks that terminally ill patients ought to be able to choose to have their lives ended. Among health workers, the percentage is slightly higher at 80%. Though a free vote is a matter of conscience, many MPs will wish to mirror their constituents’ opinions and overturn the 330 to 118 votes against the Assisted Dying Bill (No. 2) in 2015. Killing the willing looks set to be on the statute books early if Starmer gets into Number Ten.
As is always the case with voluntary euthanasia agitators, Starmer has stated that legalising assisted dying must be accompanied by powerful safeguards to protect the vulnerable from being pressured into signing their life away. But there lies the problem: in nearly every country where voluntary euthanasia has been legally permitted, the safeguards have been trampled on and more and more people have become eligible for termination. If anyone thinks I am engaging in the fallacy of the slippery slope argument, here are some facts.
Take, for example, Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) programme. At first, only those whose death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’ could ask to be killed. Now, anyone more or less suffering from an illness or disability can do so. In 2027, those suffering with mental illness will have the right to apply for MAID.
Not to be outdone by their northern neighbours, US policymakers in Oregon, California, Hawaii, Vermont and Washington State have expanded the number of reasons why a person can request assisted suicide.
The reason for this widening eligibility is that the limits to who can apply for state-sponsored deaths are challenged by those who are suffering very badly and who do not qualify under existing legislation. In an age of equal opportunities, how can legislators deny them an equal opportunity to assisted suicide?
If anyone wants specific cases, here is one: the ongoing case of a Canadian woman who at the age of twenty-seven and because of her autism was given the green light to die earlier this year. Her father, with whom she lives, has gone to court to try to prevent this. (For legal reasons neither can be named.) His case rests on the fact that apart from her autism, she is completely healthy. Yet two doctors have agreed she can die.
But what about the unbearable pain someone might reply. Surely someone in perpetual agony ought to be put down. But as Chicago University’s Dr Daniel P Sulmasy made clear in an Intelligence Squared debate with the ethicist Peter Singer, pain and other symptoms can almost always be alleviated. As evidence, Sulmasy referred to how the top reason for choosing assisted suicide is not insupportable pain but the fear of being a burden on relatives and medical professionals.
Starmer thinks he is doing the terminally ill a favour by giving them a way out. But instead, he will end up putting those among them who reject his option, and a widening range of people such as the mentally ill, under pressure to go the way of the sedative overdose. For the leader of a supposedly compassionate political party, Starmer has a very strange way of showing it.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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From personal experience, pain cannot always be controlled (unless so heavily dosed with morphine that the patient becomes comatose and eventually dies anyway). The safeguard should rely solely with the individual, not doctors or the family, and there ought to be an opt in or out just the same as for organ donations.
There are people with terminal conditions who want to retain control of their lives and deaths who are, under current legislation, treated with less consideration than family pets. Once politicians and the NHS get involved in setting the rules it will inevitably become overly complicated and not of benefit to those it should benefit with leeway for the abuse that has been highlighted.
I already half-expect to leave this world under my own steam. Right now, I’m mid-fifties, incredibly healthy and the furthest thing from suicidal. But, I am not prepared to wither away and succumb to a debilitating illness, should that ever occur. I will not fade away in a nursing home and whether assisted dying is made legal or not, I reserve the right to whatever I want with my body. I’ve discussed this with my son and he understands and respects my feelings. For me, the thought of having such an option is a comfort. I don’t have a religion, and therefore no belief in an afterlife. Hence there is no stigma attached. Obviously, there ought to be stringent guidelines and I fully accept that what Canada is doing is something altogether sinister. But this is an important issue that people ought to have access to.
I couldn’t agree more, but the issue is bound to be hijacked by both sides of the argument for all the wrong reasons. As in all areas of life and death (not silly current whims) the rights and wishes of the individual (unless doing proveable serious physical or mental harm to others) should always be paramount. Unfortunately it’s usually too late by the time the patient decides they’ve had enough and if in hospital will be prevented from ‘harming’ themselves and condemned to an undignified death or a slower death through morphine.
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