Did COVID restrictions help shift the debate against assisted suicide?

(LifeSiteNews) — The recent defeat of the latest attempt to legalize assisted suicide in England and Wales represented a major victory for the British pro-life movement and a rare glimmer of hope in an ever-darkening Western world, where the sanctity of life, the family, and traditional moral values are under constant attack.

With this, the second time in 2026 that such legislation fell in the British Parliament (the previous incarnation having cleared the House of Commons but run out of time in the House of Lords), we may dare to hope that the question is now settled for a generation. However, as defenders of innocent life, we must remain vigilant.

To understand what might have forced this dramatic turnaround, it might be helpful to consider these events in the context of the draconian restrictions to which Britain (like most of the world) was subjected during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the confusing and contradictory messages fed to us by the government and media may have paradoxically prompted the nation to rethink its understanding of the sanctity of life.

Britain was one of the last major economies to shut down during the spring of 2020; then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson was instinctively opposed to a national lockdown but ultimately succumbed to the urgings of his advisers. For me, the most puzzling aspect of the economically and socially devastating restrictions was that they completely flew in the face of the razor-sharp proportionality guidelines underpinning Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), even before one considers the tragedy of patients with survivable cancers or other serious illnesses facing delayed diagnoses.

Since 1999, the NHS has relied on the guidance of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to decide which drugs and other treatments are made available free at point of delivery. NICE uses the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) metric to assess how many good-quality years a particular treatment will give a patient with a life-threatening illness, also considering the cost of the treatment to determine the “pounds per QALY.”

Many have condemned that system as utilitarian insofar as it weighs life expectancy and quality of life against purely economic considerations. The UK is, indeed, the only developed country whose national framework for provision of state-funded healthcare is driven by QALYs. But this makes it harder to believe that the British state would adopt a “preserve all life at all costs” mindset in confronting a pandemic which, it soon became clear, had a survival rate north of 99 percent.

There may be a morally treacherous grey area between proportionality and utilitarianism, but one need not be a doctor to know, for example, that medical science has now reached the point where it could significantly increase life expectancy but cannot greatly improve quality of life for the elderly. And it is hardly utilitarian to prefer dying naturally and peacefully at a respectable age to being kept alive as long as scientifically possible, even if the socioeconomic considerations underpinning all Western healthcare systems nowadays are partly symptomatic of moral decline.

Why, though, during COVID were statistics showing 1,400 people over the age of 65 having died each day in England and Wales the year before the virus emerged blithely swept under the rug? Furthermore, why the later aggressive push to get the entire population vaccinated, including the very elderly?

Knowing this to be somewhat out of character for the NHS (with its many faults), I started to smell a rat. If when things eventually returned to normal, might their “preserve all life at all costs” mentality permeate through to the public provisioning of medication, with not only QALYs scrapped but all regard for quality of life shunted aside?

In that scenario, the prospect of an already-scarce palliative care provision being further weakened by a harsh treatment regime would prove to be a major boost for advocates of assisted suicide. They could portray us pro-lifers as seeking to deny the dying even the right to discontinue life-prolonging treatment, when this is of course a perfectly prudent and morally permissible recourse for some patients and not remotely comparable to euthanasia or assisted suicide.

Ultimately, my fears about a reckless NHS overhaul were not realized. But flash-forward several years, and the way MP Kim Leadbeater attempted to label the provisions of her Assisted Dying Bill as morally equivalent to a terminally ill patient discharging himself from hospital perfectly sums up how morally confused society has become – namely, in failing to distinguish between taking a life and letting nature run its course. This would have made it easy for the death lobby to exploit the COVID madness in different ways.

Note, for instance, that the vast majority of the British population stoically accepted lockdown for so long as a necessary sacrifice to preserve life, even though today’s Western European mindset generally regards life as pointless if one cannot visit bars, travel abroad, etc.

This raises another disturbing possibility: Could the British media’s “stay at home to save granny” message have been part of a cynical ploy to make the idea of euthanizing granny more palatable? Consider how Christmas 2020 was, in a secular sense, effectively canceled, with the government assuring people this would enable them to spend future Christmases with loved ones – when in reality they were condemning more than 500,000 senior citizens to spend their last Christmas alone or only with immediate family.

Returning to the present, it seems that if the government, media, and the death lobby did attempt to use the chaos and confusion of COVID to turn doctors into killers of the ill, then their strategy has mercifully backfired. The draconian restrictions of 2020-21, which wrought havoc on the nation’s social fabric and mental health, may instead have had the opposite effect: forcing the public 1) to question whether a government and a healthcare system which gleefully trample on the principle of triage and abandon any pretense of holistic care amid a media-fueled panic frenzy can really be trusted with powers of life and death, and 2) to think carefully about how precious life really is.

It remains to be seen whether this ultimately forces a wider re-examination of the British collective conscience, resulting in abortion also starting to become unthinkable. But the defeat of the latest attempt to legalize assisted dying reminds us that there is still hope, that even when the enemy seems strongest and darkness is everywhere, there is a light we cannot see.