The former Archbishop of Canterbury has suddenly come out in favour of legalising assisted suicide.
Since Lord Carey once was an Anglican prelate, he no doubt holds every law, especially if involving life and death, to the test of Christian doctrine.
This must mean that, if a proposed legislation tallies with Christianity, he’ll support it. If it doesn’t, he won’t.
The last time Lord Carey went on record as a strong opponent of assisted suicide was in 2006, eight years ago. Now a week may be a long time in politics, but on the timescale of the doctrine that was divinely inspired (as Lord Carey is institutionally obliged to believe) and then took centuries to be properly understood, eight years is no time at all.
So what kind of epiphany has made Lord Carey reconsider? What exactly has changed since 2006?
His answer had better be good, for opposition to suicide, assisted or otherwise, is fundamental to Christian doctrine. It’s for no trivial reasons that suicides traditionally have been denied Christian burial, available even to murderers.
Like murder, suicide is an arbitrary taking of a human life, the sanctity of which is affirmed by both Testaments. Unlike murder, suicide can’t be repented. It’s an act of ultimate defiance, a denial of God’s sovereignty over one’s life – and by inference over all life.
I’m not aware of any post-2006 alterations to Christian doctrine that would demand a change of heart on this issue. The only other possible explanation for Lord Carey’s impersonation of a weathervane is that life itself has undergone changes with which the Church has failed to keep pace.
Lord Carey must therefore be privy to some exclusive information about a tectonic shift in human condition. To be fair, he isn’t reticent about sharing this knowledge: “The old philosophical certainties have collapsed in the face of the reality of needless suffering.”
The underlying assumption (other than the unthinkable one, that Lord Carey has gone gaga) has to be that since 2006 physical suffering en route to the pearly gates has become either more real or more needless.
If Lord Carey has new data to that effect, he should by all means speak out. In the absence of such data, however, the statement sounds suspiciously like meaningless bleeding-heart twaddle.
In fact, palliative relief becomes more effective every year. As I can testify from personal experience, even most cancer patients don’t suffer as much as they used to. In any case, it would be simply false to claim that suffering has increased over the last eight years.
If suffering remains a constant condition of human life, especially as it draws to a close, then perhaps the Church has changed its attitude to it? This would have to be drastic, considering that suffering is the formative experience of Christianity.
Presumably, Lord Carey has to believe that the pain Jesus Christ suffered on the cross was the birth pain of our civilisation. He must also be aware of the role martyrdom has played in Christianity since the time of the 12 apostles.
Perhaps not, as his comment suggests: by opposing Lord Falconer’s bill, the Church according to Lord Carey runs the risk of “promoting anguish and pain, the very opposite of a Christian message of hope.”
But the Christian message of hope has nothing to do with the absence of physical pain. It’s the hope of salvation, resurrection and eternal life in Christ – surely even a former Anglican prelate must be familiar with the concept?
These days, who knows. The C of E is wavering on all sorts of ‘philosophical certainties’ including, as this article shows, its opposition to homosexual marriage: http://anglicanmainstream.org/gay-pride-sex-discrimination-and-anglo-catholic-incoherence/
If Lord Carey’s footing is so wobbly on his familiar ground, he predictably slips and slides all over the place when stepping outside it.
Assisted death, he says, is already happening “in the shadows”, with doctors carrying out mercy killings of hopeless patients. Irrelevant if true, I’d say.
Doctors may sometimes exercise their judgement in such matters. However, it’s still against both accepted medical practice and indeed the law for a doctor to kill a patient with, say, a cyanide injection or pill.
Doctors have always been known to withdraw treatment when they feel that the patient won’t benefit, and may indeed suffer, from it. Personally, I’m slightly uneasy about this, but then, unlike Lord Carey, I’m often given to doubt.
I’m even less unequivocal on another medical practice, also widespread ‘in the shadows’. When a patient is in unbearable pain and, in the doctor’s judgement, has only days left to live, the doctor may administer a higher than safe analgesic dose of opiates.
This dose, he feels, may cause death and then again it may not. A responsible doctor won’t take this risk if he feels he may be robbing the patient of weeks of his life. But when the life expectancy is counted in hours or at most days, he’ll sometimes make this decision, usually with the family’s consent.
As I say, I have my doubts about the medical ethics of such a de facto mercy killing. I also question another practice: doctors terminating pregnancy in extreme cases, which they always did even when abortion was illegal.
What I have no doubts about whatsoever is that there exists a wide and, one hopes, unbridgeable gap between such practices and legalised assisted suicide or, for that matter, abortion.
Since 1967, when the latter was legalised in Britain, it has come to be seen as a normal medical procedure, on a par with appendectomy. As a result 200,000 unborn babies are being killed every year, a number that would probably have turned off all but the most fanatical advocates of legalisation back in the ‘60s.
The example of every country that has legalised euthanasia shows that, when made legal, assisted suicide also becomes much more widespread – four times so in Holland’s case. It doesn’t take a huge suspension of disbelief to predict that sooner or later it’ll become compulsory.
The likely possibility of such a nightmarish scenario should repel not just every Christian but indeed every decent person. Can it be that Lord Carey is neither? Surely not.