Death, Life, and the Power of the Tongue

An Unspoken Speech Outside Parliament

At the recent rally outside the Houses of Parliament regarding the Assisted Dying bill, I was due to give a short speech which—due to a last-minute change of ally venue —ended up not being spoken.

Given that it was written specifically for that event on that day, I didn’t quite know what else to do with it, so I offer it below in case the words plant even just one seed in one reader leading to fruitful reflection and action on this issue. In such deathly times for the cause of life in “civilised” societies, perhaps we must be especially alert to the neglect of the significance of a single person made in God’s image, however abused that image may have become.

Indeed, when we hear of a tragic and untimely death (such as that of the Liverpool footballer Diogo Jota, who died alongside his younger brother in a car crash just a few days ago) the outpourings of public grief are both pointed and palpable. This is because the death seems “unfair”, so out of sync with our expectations, something which “ought not” happen.

Such moments seem to burst the bubble of our “entitlement” to life. They also ought to remind us—but seldom do—of the ways our society decides all too conveniently on how and why to end the lives of the inconvenient, as Britain’s politicians did in that new moral Rubicon on the killability of the frailest human beings on earth.

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