Some thoughts on assisted suicide

People’s attitude towards government has long confused me. Almost to a man, members of the general public will profess to detest politicians. There are types of rapidly metastasising melanomas with higher popularity rates than the average Member of Parliament.

Nevertheless, whenever confronted with a dilemma, Joe Bloggs will invariably demand that some cruddy PPE graduate or parliamentary diversity hire legislate their problem away.

It is akin to the abused partner who forever returns to their pugilistic paramour: surely this time it will be different. It never is, of course, and only the abusee who recognises this fact will eventually escape the cycle.

Yet run back we do. While we see the state’s failings around each day – be it our declining GDP per capita, creaking infrastructure or ballooning crime rates – people remain miraculously wedded to solutions dreamt up by second rate minds in Westminster or, more terrifyingly still, by the conker-sized brains occupying positions in local government across the land.

While obviously not experts in much more than feathering their nests, this supine reliance forms part of modern society’s desire to ‘trust the experts’. As the world has become so utterly complex this makes some of sense, with the average individual unable to comprehend but the merest sliver of what goes on around them. “Surely,” they think to themselves, “there must be people who know what is going on!”

Nowhere is the illusion of expertism more intensely expressed than in medicine, with the hysteria of Covid-19 its apogee. Doctors, suddenly, were Fonts Of All Knowledge. Anyone with the merest medical credential became an overnight authority on public health. An entire apparatus of unnecessary health and societal interventions were constructed on the back of the maybes, possiblys and could-bes of these same people.

And, so, enters the debate on ‘assisted dying’ - or, rather, ‘assisted suicide’ - with legislation enabling it passed last week.

Like many things it sounds eminently sensible. Who would argue that, if suffering from a terminal illness, one’s plight should not be shortened? Who are we to insist that those in the midst of life’s final and tragic decline should not have the option to flick the switch and be the master of their own fate?

When put like that, surely nobody could stand against such an idea. Yet, we do not live in a world of such simplicity. While intentions are good there is no guarantee that they will not end up on the much-famed road to hell.

In a country where the intrinsic worth of life itself is not agreed upon – amid Christianity’s loosened grip and 25% of British pregnancies ending in abortion – arguments against euthanasia on the basis of traditional morality are increasingly difficult.

Yet there is also the ‘slippery slope’. If we could, in some parallel universe, ensure that only those with the necessary cognitive function and suffering from end-stage illness could flick the big red kill switch without any outside sway or influence, then I could get behind it.

But what of those of diminished mental faculties? Or those who feel a pressure or imagine themselves to a burden to those around them? ‘Safeguards’ comes the reply.

You will need two doctors to sign off on a death request. Yet you can find doctors who will do anything: there are enough of them to create in recent times an industry which busies itself with the chemical and physical mutilation of young people seduced into believing they are the ‘wrong’ gender. No doubt you will be able to find enough doctors who will happily sign on the dotted line of someone’s death warrant. Josef Mengele was a doctor too, let us not forget.

Other parts of the world have pressed ahead. Already in 2022, 4.1% of deaths in Canada were carried out through its euthanasia programme, growing by 31.2% year-on-year. The strict requirements envisaged during the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) programme’s inception have been watered down after only a few years, with the once required ‘reasonable foreseeability of natural death’ waived in 2021, essentially opening the door to ‘assisted dying’ in non-life-threatening cases.

Depressed? Terminally sad? Maybe death is the right option for you. In recent months the Canadian government has tried to expand MAID’s remit to cover those suffering from mental illness as well, resulting in veterans with PTSD being recommended state-backed suicide. I cannot be alone in finding this grotesque.

Given how trendy ‘mental illness’ has become – and I use the term ‘trendy’ intentionally – it should not be sceptics of euthanasia alone who worry about the policy’s potential for frightening overreach.

For overreach will necessarily take place. As with any government provision, its inception is not its endpoint but its beginning. The requirements put in place will, in time, be amended and added to. There is no law which, once introduced, becomes a static entity. They grow and gather speed, encompassing more and more. Either we say ‘no’ from the start or accept the snowballing effect.

While today we may discuss the terminally ill, tomorrow the blurred lines of those with ‘mental illness’ – however loosely defined – will be for the self-desired chopping block. This has already happened in other jurisdictions, with the terminally depressed able to outsource the shuffling of their mortal coil should their ‘mental illness’ be acute enough: a perverse ‘cure’ for such an ailment.

As with any argument of a highly emotional kind, there is no clear-cut argument. I do not pretend that opposing assisted dying will lead to sub-optimal results in individual cases. Yet, if it means that some life-or-death power is taken out of the hands of the so-called ‘professionals’ in our midst then I consider this a positive. Life is hard and unkind at times, but this is the price we pay as free individuals imbued with liberty and autonomy.

Moreover, it is macabre to note the obvious: we all have the ability to kill ourselves at one point or another. If we are presented with the guarantee of a horrid, protracted death, then let us be the authors of our own demise. I would rather be my own hangman than permit a disinterested GP with 500 other patients make a split-second decision either way on my behalf, or to decide that, once too-far-gone, that my death would be for the ‘greater good’ (of course current ‘safeguards’ prevent this).

Imperfect? Yes, of course. But that is the nature of existence. Let us stop devolving powers to the experts. It will only lead to hardship and woe. I cannot say that I feel passionately about the issue – I recognise the complication involved – but life is by necessity complicated. There is no clear-cut solution. Let us stop pretending so.