Licence to kill?

Assisted suicide could soon become legal in the UK. All the signs indicate that there will be another piece of legislation before MPs later in the year.

Since 2003, there have been more than ten serious legislative attempts at Westminster to change the law on this issue, but each one has failed. The most recent was September 2015, where MPs rejected the Assisted Dying Bill by 330–118. Given how much the House of Commons has changed since the last vote, the outcome of this next challenge is far from certain.

Having failed in the courts, the pro-assisted suicide lobby has switched its attention to the medical bodies. They know that a key argument employed in 2015 to persuade MPs to vote against the Assisted Dying Bill was the fact that all major medical bodies were opposed to changing the law to allow assisted suicide. But now the cracks in that stronghold have begun to appear.

Medical bodies

In March this year, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) polled its members on what stance the College should take on a change in the law. In a highly irregular and controversial move, they announced before the poll was launched that unless a super-majority of 60% voted against or in favour of changing the law, the College would automatically go neutral. In other words, the poll seemed to be framed deliberately to produce the desired outcome of allowing the College to go neutral, hiding behind its sham poll.

Last month, another medical body said it would poll its members. The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) represents family doctors and is intending to consult them on whether the body should go neutral on a change in the law on assisted suicide. The doctors’ trade union, the British Medical Association, has also voted in favour of consulting its members on the issue. Make no mistake about it: if the RCGP joins the RCP in going neutral, this will be interpreted as a green light by advocates of assisted suicide to put increasing pressure on Parliament to back this dangerous change in the law, and there is no guarantee MPs will not be seduced into thinking that, with enough safeguards, such a law could work.

Point of no return

Yet if you look at the evidence from other jurisdictions where assisted suicide is legal, they reveal the devastating consequences of regimes where it is legal to kill others in the name of ‘dignity’. It shows us that assisted suicide is impossible to effectively regulate.

In the US and Canada there are cases of patients being denied costly lifesaving treatment, yet they are offered help to die. In the Netherlands and Belgium, euthanasia laws which were initially limited to terminally ill adults now include children and those who lack mental capacity (see July en front page).

Following Christ

This is, of course, a highly sensitive topic and is often very personal to us when we see our loved ones in pain or enduring physical suffering. But we must be obedient to the command ‘You shall not murder’. The word for murder includes both premeditated and accidental murder. God is explicitly clear that such behaviour is worthy of the strongest possible condemnation. Our lives are his to give or take away, and we are to carry the cross he calls us to bear in all circumstances. Indeed, we worship a God who became man, and endured the worst possible physical and mental suffering, so we know that He sympathises with us and understands our pain. But the answer to this is not to take control into our own hands and empower doctors with the dangerous ability to legally kill certain patients. If we do that, the right to die will quickly become the duty to die.

God made all human beings in His image, and that includes those who follow in His image as a man of sorrows. To take a life is to offend that reality and it hurts the heart of our Father God. Assisted suicide undermines the dignity and worth that is intrinsic in all people. People who are suffering physically and mentally are at their most vulnerable – we must protect them, not kill them.