By CatholicVote | Created at 2024-11-18 22:40:54 | Updated at 2024-11-23 08:08:38
4 days ago
CV NEWS FEED // A man who spent almost a year in a United Kingdom prison has seen firsthand what horrors can occur when people don’t recognize the humanity of their neighbors. He is now warning that legalizing assisted suicide, which is currently up for consideration in the UK, would lead directly to this dehumanization.
“The drafters of the bill use words such as ‘medicine’ to describe the poisons that will be used to kill, as if they intuit the evil of what they are proposing,” David Shipley wrote in a November 14 article in The Tablet. “They would usher in a culture in which life is no longer sacred.”
The 38-page bill proposed by Labor Party Member of Parliament (MP) Kim Leadbeater will be debated in Parliament for a total of five hours November 29.
Shipley spent almost a year as an inmate at HMP Wandsworth, according to his November 14 article. He committed fraud in 2014 and was jailed for it in 2020, according to his website. He now advocates for prison reform.
“It is because I have seen with my own eyes what happens to powerless people who are seen as inconvenient by one arm of the state that I am deeply fearful of the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill,” Shipley wrote November 14, noting that the bill would legalize a doctor killing an individual who requests it and is deemed an “eligible” patient.
Shipley recalled how officers at the prison became indifferent to the inmates, with one even expressing disappointment when an inmate survived after jumping from a high landing. In another instance, officers restrained inmates from helping another prisoner who was likely experiencing a heart attack. The officers did not attempt to perform CPR but rather stood by for some time until first responders came.
Shipley wrote that to this day, he pities the officers. He also argued that their indifference toward fellow persons did not happen overnight. When new officers came, they had compassion, and they would either leave before the environment would change them, or stay long enough to become indifferent to the suffering.
If assisted suicide is legalized, Shipley warned that physicians would find themselves in a similar peril: “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.”
He also pointed out that those working in the UK prisons “dehumanise prisoners, seeing them as a burden and an inconvenience.” He later warned that those who are elderly, infirm, or vulnerable would likely experience pressure to choose assisted suicide so as not to be a burden on relatives or on the National Health System.
In his conclusion, Shipley reiterated the importance of rejecting the legalization of assisted suicide.
“I’ve lived in a place where human life is treated as worthless, inconvenient and irrelevant,” he wrote. “I’ve seen how quickly people can come to treat their fellow human beings as less than human. We must not allow this horror.”
