In a society like ours, the idea of "Assisted Dying" will always be made to sound sensible and kind. But over time, you can see what will happen. (Or can you?)
The Assisted Dying Bill is due to go before the UK Parliament tomorrow. Tim Dieppe of Christian Concern recently interviewed a man who was given a terminal diagnosis for pancreatic cancer, who would have been “eligible” for assisted dying, if it were legalised.
This man rightly challenged the bill on the basis of his Christian faith, emphasising the reality and severity of death, not least for unbelievers:
“I want to live until God decides it’s time for me to die. I don’t know how I will die, and I don’t want to know how I will die. After death, I know that I will go to a better world because I believe in Jesus. There is a reality of judgement for those who don’t know Jesus. Death is a one-way trip. You don’t pop up again like in computer games. People don’t realise how serious death is.
Indeed, it seems there is a correlation between those who do not realise how serious death is, and those who do not realise how serious life is.
This is because many in our society today do not even see the meaning of life. They have no framework for it. They get on with it hoping they will not have to face these existential questions. They may seem to get on fine, enjoying life, going here and there, making plans, all the while not realising it may all be over within an instant:
“you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” (James 4:14)
The average atheist or agnostic westerner not only does not see their life in the prism of death, they have no true understanding—beyond temporary self-fulfilment—of why their life (or any life) even matters in the first place.
A Glimpse of Dystopia
Such a worldview obviously has disastrous consequences when it comes to assessing questions of social morality and legality. If you do not have a basis for the true significance of human life, how can you possibly understand the true significance of death? Worldviews are not neutral. They lead in particular directions. Things follow (or don’t follow) from their presuppositions.
One comment from the aforementioned man’s wife was particularly insightful: "It will start off like it always does..." Indeed it will. And if not checked, it will end like it always does too. In a society like ours, a concept like "assisted dying" will always be made to sound sensible and kind at the outset. This is how it goes. This is how people fall for folly, time and time again.
At first, people will tell stories of this or that individual mired in intense suffering, incapable of any quality of life. By comparison to the emotive pleas to allow this or that person to have the choice ("assisted" by the all-benevolent state) to end their life, any objections to the bill can be made to sound hollow and heartless. “Don’t you care about their pain? Have you no compassion?”
One can see how this will go. Soon enough, the emotive stories which got the bill through the door by manipulating consciences and blurring moral compasses, will fade into insignificance as the practice becomes ever more "normal", just another part of the accepted moral furniture, as ordinary as going for any medical operation.
Perhaps there may still be some idealistic types around who will be permitted to offer mild protest against the practice from time to time (within appropriate boundaries and buffer zones, naturally). But to most "sensible" people it will eventually seem increasingly ludicrous to imagine changing it back again. Some will speak condescendingly of that strange, primitive time in the past when Assisted Dying was seen more simplistically by those who were simply naïve about the moral complexity of the issue.
By such a time, perhaps an entire economy will have emerged, flooded with "assistants" each competing to offer different products, technologies, and "death packages" to improve the quality of their service and the customer experience. The "customer" may once have been seen as the person "being assisted" to die. However, in time, it will have been decided it was "more prudent" to accept custom from those designated as the "assistants to the assisted" too. These people left behind are, after all, more directly affected by the outcome than the assisted person, who does not bear any further consequences once the assisted action is "completed".
In the early days, these assistants will be restricted to close family members. But over time, given "the complexity of modern family arrangements", it will eventually be decided that it makes sense to extend this option to wider family members, close friends, even acquaintances or colleagues, just so long as the appropriate formal procedures are adhered to. All must be "above board". Especially legalised murder.
In time, agencies will emerge, offering additional clerical services to "ease the burden" of these complex bureaucratic procedures, which add "excessive emotional and administrative strain to these assistants-to-the-assisted". After all, such people are already making very difficult decisions as it is, are they not? Through further lobbying, legislation will be tweaked and tweaked to better reflect the current practices and context. And so it will go, and so society will go, and so morality will go.
"What ludicrous speculation," the supporters of the Bill might now say of such projections. They cannot imagine where things will go. That’s because, as the wife of that man rightly said: "It will start off like it always does."
Secularism Has Consequences
We must not be blind. In a post-Christian "secular" society, where there is no consensus on the meaningfulness and unique dignity of human life, it is obvious that those who are shaped by this moral ambiguity will find it difficult not to make utilitarian choices about the usefulness (or not) of a person's life to society. Their value will come to be seen not as inherent, but as disposable according to their economic or socio-political value.
Secularists (and those influenced by them) have long argued over the details of when or why an unborn human may "begin to matter" at some point during or after a pregnancy. The same will happen with the elderly and other vulnerable people, where it may be arbitrarily decided when or why they "cease to matter". If we are not made in the image of God, in whose image are we made? If God did not give us dignity, where do we go to find it? And if we do not find it, what kind of choices will we make regarding life and death?
With no objective standard of morality, no clear sense of why we are here and to whom we are accountable in life and death, we descend into the moral abyss of "each to their own", where the strong will be permitted to trample the weak so long as they fill in the correct form.
As a doctor, I wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole - not even if you paid me top dollar. Shove it!