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It all sounds so plausible.  Faced with a lingering death with great pain or loss of mental function, surely it is only compassionate for patients to be allowed to ask doctors to end their lives early, with peaceful dignity?  On Wednesday of this week Kim Leadbeater MP introduced a bill described on the UK Parliament website as to allow adults who are terminally ill, subject to safeguards and protections, to request and be provided with assistance to end their own life; and for connected purposes.  

It is already possible for patients, quite rightly in many cases, to refuse further medical intervention at the end of life, or to be given strong painkillers, but this proposal is for the administration of lethal drugs which are quite different from the painkillers, deliberately to end the patient’s life.  This will be debated over coming weeks, and has the support of the Prime Minister.

Such a proposal was last debated in the House of Commons in September 2015, when it was defeated by 330 votes to 118.  However, the 2024 intake of MPs may think differently, and polls also suggest a shift in public opinion. The plausibility of such a proposal is enhanced by the language campaigners use: assisted dying not killing, and the rebranding of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society as “Dignity in Dying”.  Kim Leadbeater has also appealed to the inevitability of “progress” – “The law hasn’t changed for 60 years”, she says, as if that were in itself sufficient grounds for change.

The truth is, though, that God’s law hasn’t changed for over 3,000 years.  The sixth commandment (above) bans the taking of innocent human life.  It is based on the dignity of humanity as made in the image of God (see Genesis 9:6).  Murder is always taken with great seriousness in Scripture.  When King Saul was critically wounded in the battle of Mount Gilboa, he feared falling, wounded into enemy hands.  He asked his armour-bearer to kill him.  But, terrified, the armour-bearer refused the king’s order.

Euthanasia – let’s call it we used to – has always been illegal in the UK, because our common law is based on the ten commandments.  But now we feel less bound by them, and our culture’s embrace of personal choice as the ultimate value – seen in many other areas of life – inevitably comes to impinge on this. 

The trouble is that if this is legalised, the choice may end up not being so personal.  Once euthanasia becomes accepted practice – as it has in Holland and Canada – it is a small step to an elderly and frail person feeling worried about burning up their kids’ inheritance in a care home, or a cancer patient no longer wanting to be a drain on the medical services.  Understandably, people with disabilities, such as paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson, fear the long-term consequences of a society that has reached a new definition of ‘a life worth living’. 

In both Holland and Canada, nearly one in twenty deaths are now ‘assisted’.

It is not true that the only alternative to euthanasia has to be weeks of agonised pain.  The sadly-underfunded hospice movement has provided a compassionate alternative, and pain relief is highly effective in the vast majority of cases.

You and I are citizens with a voice.  Since the narrative in some media is that public opinion on this has changed, we might counter that by writing to our MP.   Our Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner’s email address is here.

God gives His commandments for our good; we tweak them at our peril.