Euthanasia is not the Answer

A guest article by Henry George

The following is an article by Henry George that was originally published in the Autumn 2024 issue of Salisbury Review. Given ‘assisted’ dying/euthanasia is firmly - if obliquely - being pushed by Keir Starmer’s government, Henry kindly agreed to let me republish here.

I’ve always been interested in promoting other people’s work, particularly people just starting out (which Henry is not). If you’d like to use my modestly-sized platform, let me know. The unhinged the better.

A vote to legalise assisted suicide will likely be on the cards with a Labour victory in the general election. As someone opposed to a change in the law, this feels like a creeping shadow, engulfing opponents and supporters alike.

The question of assisted suicide is hardest where compassion for the terminally sick is concerned. I understand the impulse here, and do not diminish the pain and suffering in which too many still end their lives. I have a severe, genetic fragile skin condition called Recessive Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa, which leads to blisters and wounds equivalent to third degree burns. My subtype is also prone to extremely aggressive skin cancers, of which I’ve had five. The pain is often extreme. Life expectancy is short. The end will not be easy.

Roger Scruton wrote that “the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth”. I fear arguments from compassion about assisted suicide for terminal illness imply that a life like mine is also not worth living, that it does not have any depth, nor any value. That it would be better off shorter than it already is. Law is a teacher, and would give license to this view of life, shaping our collective moral sense. We see the result in Oregon, where 53% who seek assisted suicide do so for fear of “being a burden.”

Further, once assisted suicide becomes a right that is tied to compassion, what is the means to prevent its expansion beyond the terminally ill? One cannot define unbearable suffering in a self-limiting way. Now, in Canada, Holland, and Belgium, euthanasia of the mentally ill and “mature minors” aged 12 is either proposed or pursued. The answer is surely expanding investment in and access to improved psychiatric care, pain management and palliative care. Kill the pain, not the patient.

This is where the arguments from autonomy come in, on a par with compassion. Many assisted suicide advocates argue for the bodily autonomy of individuals who do not wish to lose control and succumb to the universal frailty of the human condition. Dame Esther Rantzen’s discussion of assisted suicide has been framed in this manner. Meanwhile, one of the main proponents in the Lords, Lord Falconer, also emphasises the aspect of control as paramount.

These arguments ignore that our individual choices ripple beyond our individual lives. We are shaped by and shape others through a web of relationships. My disability is a heightened form of our dependent human condition. I wouldn’t be here without the love of my family. Arguments from compassion and autonomy pass

over the vital virtue of this solidarity in suffering, of our bonds of mutual loyalty. We face the perverse situation of lamenting the scars left by suicide while affirming assisted suicide. As R.H. Tawney put it, freedom for the pike is death for minnow, and we see this in Canada where the poor and disabled are increasingly slipping through the safeguards and pushed into euthanasia.

This points to the last two arguments: utilitarianism and progress. Times columnist Matthew Parris welcomed what others fear: social pressure on the old and terminally ill to seek assisted suicide in utilitarian terms, increasing happiness for the greatest number. This would be a good thing, as it would improve the social fitness of the group and ease pressure on the public purse. Parris would applaud the situation in Oregon. The Canadian Medical Association and others would agree, saying that the Medical Assistance in Dying programme would save up to $100 million a year. How unlikely is it that the NHS wouldn’t adopt such an approach? Particularly given the use of blanket Do Not Resuscitate Orders for the learning disabled during Covid. This view ends by reducing individuals to biomass awaiting disposal for the greater good. It is the politics of “no man, no problem”.

Matt Hancock MP has meanwhile compared the campaign for assisted suicide to the legalisation of homosexuality in the 1960s and of gay marriage in the 2010s. In this view, moral progress marches one way, to ever greater liberation from social and bodily limits. It is ironic however that Hancock’s call to push moral progress forwards stands to send us revolving right round the clock of history, returning to a pre-Christian world where the weak, disabled, and elderly were killed at birth or cast aside in old age. Those like myself stand to be kicked into the ditch at the roadside of progress, with those responsible convinced of their place on the right side of history.

In the end, legalising assisted suicide and euthanasia means giving legal and moral license to cruelty that wears a mask of kindness. We must not do so.