By CatholicVote | Created at 2024-11-15 21:41:39 | Updated at 2024-11-23 09:32:06
1 week ago
CV NEWS FEED // On November 29, the United Kingdom’s Members of Parliament (MPs) will have five hours to debate a bill about legalizing assisted suicide in the country. The text of the 38-page bill was released on November 11, less than three weeks before the debate.
“It is outrageous that MPs and the wider public are only seeing this Bill barely two and a half weeks before it goes to a vote,” stated Right to Life UK on its website, describing the deadly bill as a “monumental change to our laws.”
The organization is urging citizens to contact their MPs and call on them to reject the bill. The Catholic bishops of the UK are also voicing opposition to the bill and criticizing what little time has been allotted for its debate. They have also called for prayer to protect the sanctity of life.
In a joint November 15 statement, the Catholic bishops of England, Wales, and Scotland decried the time allotted for the bill’s consideration as “woefully inadequate.”
“We are alarmed by the impact that legalisation will have on the most vulnerable members of our society,” they said, noting that persons with disabilities, the elderly, and the infirm may experience implicit or explicit pressure to undergo assisted suicide.
“The protection of such people is the foundation of civilised society,” they said. “It is at the heart of good government.”
Right to Life UK also warned that the change would endanger vulnerable people and end the lives of many.
Statistics from places that have legalized the deadly practice reinforce this warning. A Cardus study in August found that in Canada, euthanasia is now tied as the fifth-leading cause of death in the country.
The text of the UK-based bill, sponsored by Labor Party MP Kim Leadbeater, allows for a person over 18 who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and is estimated to have six months or fewer to live, to be eligible for assisted suicide.
Anti-assisted suicide advocates have pointed out that doctors can be, and have been, wrong when estimating how long a person has to live.
According to EuroNews, the bill also prohibits coercing or pressuring someone into declaring that he or she wants to undergo assisted suicide.
Among those raising concerns about coercion and assisted suicide is BBC Newsnight hostess Victoria Derbyshire, who recently interviewed MP Christine Jardine, a co-sponsor of the bill. Derbyshire asked Jardine how a person would know that someone had not been coerced into assisted suicide, and Jardine’s answers indicated that there was no direct method of knowing.
“If you are with someone, who is, as we have all been, who is facing the end of life, and who wants to have the choice to end their life, there is a sincerity about what they say,” Jardine said in the recent interview. “It’s a very emotional conversation, and there is something about the way that they approach it, and that’s not something that you can say, something that you go through, I believe, if you’re being coerced.”
“How do you know?” Derbyshire asked, later adding, “That’s extraordinary, if that’s your criteria.”
“No, that’s not my criteria,” Jardine said.
“If they say it in a sincere enough way?” Derbyshire asked.
“That’s not my criteria,” Jardine said. “What I’m saying is, the medics, the professionals who deal with people every day, they will be trained in how to do this.”
Derbyshire pointed out that doctors are not trained in coercive control, to which Jardine said that “When the law, if the law is changed, that is when there will be safeguards put in place to ensure–”
Derbyshire interjected, “I thought this bill has the strictest safeguards in the world. Now you’re telling me that there will be further safeguards?”
Jardine then said that “the safeguards are in the bill,” to which Derbyshire reiterated that they are not. The full interview can be watched below:
However, even if the bill had some way of detecting coercion, the “very best” version of the bill could not prevent coercion entirely – because the bill itself is a coercive message. It designates certain persons as “eligible” for assisted suicide, offering them death in answer to their fears of suffering, and of being a burden to others.
Actress and disability advocate Liz Carr, who produced a documentary presenting a secular case against assisted suicide, recently warned about the overarching issue of coercion in legalizing assisted suicide.
“I think we’re talking about almost on a state level, on a system level, feeling you’ve got no choice,” Carr said.
Speaking with Carr about assisted suicide was Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC) News presenter Andrew Marr, who posited that legalizing assisted suicide would create “[a] background atmosphere that ‘frankly you are not of much value to us, you should do the decent thing and die.’”
“Do the decent thing for your family, for the state, for other people,” Carr added.
Another advocate recently warned about how assisted suicide leads to dehumanization and putting pressure on vulnerable people to die.
David Shipley, who was imprisoned for almost a year at HMP Wandsworth, wrote in a recent article about how his experience at the prison informs his opposition to assisted suicide.
“It is easy to see how, if it became a legally available option, the old, the infirm and the vulnerable would feel a mounting social pressure to die rather than to be a burden to their families or to the NHS,” Shipley wrote. “If what I’ve seen in prison is any guide, once doctors and nurses become accustomed to killing they’ll do it without concern for the horror of what they are doing.”
