Strangely, the crisis of global economics has done a disservice to campaigners for the legalisation of euthanasia. As we knuckle down for a worldwide recession, facing the misery of slashed public services, rising unemployment and flat-lining growth figures, it’s impossible to imagine political leaders telling us to cheer up because they’ve made it easier for us to kill ourselves.
That really tells us all we need to know about the mindset of those who favour voluntary euthanasia, dressed up with the cosy branding of “assisted dying”. Their motivation is less about compassion than consumerism. In a booming economy, in which consumption and instant gratification are the motors of growth, we worship at the altar of Choice. We can buy our lifestyles and satisfy all our material needs with unbounded credit. And if we can buy the way we live, why should we not order the way and time that we die?
Now that the consumerist harvest is withering on the vine, we’re re-assessing all kinds of ethical standards. Among these is the nature of what really constitutes human life and its validation, away from the baubles and trinkets that the retail and financial services industry with which our lives have been decorated during the years of plenty.
People of faith – and far from only the Christian faith – feel instinctively that there is something disordered in helping or encouraging another human being to die. We will seek justification for that instinct in the catch-all and rather vague phraseology of “the sanctity of life”, an expression that is thrown back in our faces by euthanasia lobbyists, who have also misappropriated the word “dignity”.
So we must say what we mean. And it is this: We believe that everyone, without exception, is made in God’s image and that means that no life, however physically diminished or materially deprived, is worth less than another. That principle enjoys its recognition in the way we nurture, cherish and comfort those who have come to depend utterly upon the able-bodied.
Furthermore, we reject morally the notion that those who are frail, elderly or terminally ill in some way have elected to suffer if they reject an assisted death. That is why it is not only virtuous for a society, but also holy for human beings, to pour all their efforts and resources into the loving work of palliative care, rather than the concept of death as a clinical treatment.
These articles of faith are too precious to fail. They define us as a people and as a civilisation. We pray that they live on in the hearts and minds of our legislators.
George Pitcher is an Anglican priest and author of A Time to Live: The case against assisted suicide and euthanasia. He is speaking on euthanasia at LICC in
