Almost a year ago now, when Dame Esther Rantzen first launched her campaign for a free vote on assisted dying in Parliament, I was very much in favour of decriminalisation.
I felt (and still do) that too many people suffer exhausting, highly medicalised and drawn-out deaths, often fraught with frustration and humiliation.
Having witnessed several friends battle incurable, degenerative diseases – in particular multiple sclerosis, one of the cruellest illnesses – I thought that a legal framework allowing patients to exercise a greater degree of control over the manner of their own exits would be a good thing.
Now that the hour of the Commons vote is finally approaching on Friday, I’m not so sure.
The basic principles have not changed. It’s still the case that doctors can now prolong life as never before. But it is also the case that, all too often, such lives can be very poor-quality. Is it really ‘living’ if the person is unconscious, or in constant excruciating pain, or unable to move, speak or feed themselves? If they must subject themselves to daily physical intrusions, if the machinery of their body has broken down to such an extent as to make the very act of taking the next breath a torture?
From a purely intellectual point of view, it seems right – indeed necessary – to ask those questions. But what I’ve come to realise over the course of the past year, as the arguments for and against have unfolded, is that it is not an intellectual question we’re trying to answer here, but a human one.
And I don’t think humans – let alone politicians – can be trusted not to muck this one up.
Not that I’m one of those ‘only God can decide’ types – although I respect that view. But while I firmly believe that most of humanity is generally good and kind, a significant minority are not. There are far too many who prey on the weak and the vulnerable – and the risk of coercive control in these cases cannot be ignored.
Protesters stage a demonstration outside Parliament in opposition to the assisted dying Bill
It’s not just the obvious – the pensioner pressurised into making an early exit by unscrupulous family, for example. What really worries me, particularly in the current political climate, is cultural and political coercion – the idea that we face certain insurmountable social and financial pressures and that therefore there is something expedient about legalising assisted dying as a way of reducing the bill.
I am reminded of that deeply unsettling scene in Midsommar (the 2019 film starring Florence Pugh about a murderous Swedish cult) in which two elders, having reached the end of their ‘useful’ lives, commit suicide by jumping off a cliff on to the rocks below. One dies instantly, the other survives, their screams of agony echoing throughout the valley until eventually the other cult members crush them to death with a mallet.
The risk is we end up with a sanitised version of that. Especially if you look at assisted dying not only in the context of this government’s general incompetence, but also its clear disdain for old people – as expressed through the removal of the winter fuel allowance, the tax raid on pensions and the fact that the employers’ national insurance hike will inevitably lead to care home closures.
Add to that the changes in inheritance tax for farmers, and from the point of view of some government bean counters at least, encouraging old people to remove the burden they represent might seem like an attractive solution.
It’s also of a piece with this Labour administration’s general socialist world view: the idea that human beings are just widgets, part of a worker collective with an economic utility that, once exhausted, is expendable. If legislation is passed, who’s to say that people – not just the elderly but the disabled, too – wouldn’t feel under pressure to end their lives?
The other problem is the culture around assisted dying. This week a crop of adverts appeared on the London Underground for an activist organisation called Let Us Choose. One of them featured a vivacious blonde in striped pink pyjamas dancing around her kitchen, with a caption (since covered up by the Samaritans) that read ‘my dying wish is my family won’t see me suffer – and I won’t have to’.
A poster on the London Underground as part of a campaign in favour of the Bill
Setting aside the fact that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, won’t allow junk food advertising on the Tube and yet is apparently perfectly happy to promote legalised suicide – or that the Tube network itself is sadly no stranger to suicides – framing assisted dying as a fun, glamorous choice is grotesque.
What next, the rise of the ‘deathfluencer’ on social media? Will people be live-streaming their final moments to their followers? Will ITV commission a series called ‘Death Island’, in which a group of attractive terminally ill young people competes to see who gets ‘eliminated’ last? And how about the people peddling those mini gas chambers as the latest ‘business opportunity’? You can just see where all this is heading, and it’s not very pretty.
Assisted dying legislation would only work if it’s done in a very restrained and respectful manner, and so far, everything we’ve seen from the pro lobby would indicate that the opposite will be true. That’s why I’ve changed my mind.
I still think we urgently need to tackle the issue of end-of-life care and find a way of ensuring people’s suffering is not prolonged unnecessarily. And I still have the utmost respect for Dame Esther. But this is far too important an issue to get wrong. And I for one trust neither this government’s motives nor its methods.