Unlike his two successors, Lord Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury throughout the 90s, is a force to be reckoned with.
Can you imagine any other Anglican prelate after him describing same-sex marriage as “cultural vandalism” because “there lurks an aggressive secularist and relativist approach towards an institution that has glued society”? I can’t.
I’m not sure how Lord Carey reconciled such laudable conservatism with his resolute championship of female ordination, but one way or another he is a man eminently worthy of respect. It’s in this spirit that I disagree with his article supporting the euthanasia bill.
As the bill on assisted dying goes through its second reading tomorrow, the debates about it are at their most intense. Lord Carey ploughs in, explaining that he changed his “own mind on this issue in 2012”. He was at the time the same age I am now, and let me tell you: we wrinklies tend to be quite ossified in our views.
Something dramatic must have happened to cause Lord Carey’s about-face at that venerable age, and, though he doesn’t say what it was, I can make a fair guess. He probably observed an excruciatingly painful death of someone he knew and realised that it was cruel not to relieve such horrendous suffering in any way possible.
As a sincere Christian, Lord Carey must have wrestled with that position, in conflict as it is with the notion of the sanctity of human life. He had to find a common ground there, as he writes: “Church leaders who speak out will do so on the basis of their religious convictions but they will engage with evidence such as they see it.”
Well, let’s just say that some Church leaders, such as the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, often speak out on the basis of neither their religious convictions nor evidence, but strictly as woke ideologues. Lord Carey is different though.
However, though his integrity is beyond doubt, I think he is missing the point.
He cites a heart-rending story told by a woman whose young husband was dying of cancer: “At that point, the pain relief being administered via a syringe driver was completely ineffective, providing no relief from the agonising pain caused by the numerous tumours (over 50) spread throughout his bones and soft tissue.”
Most of us have similar stories to tell, some acquired by hearsay, some by observation, others even by most distressing personal experience. Watching someone close suffer – watching anyone suffer the way Lord Carey’s correspondent describes – is unbearable, harder even than enduring one’s own pain. My heart strings tugged by Lord Carey are playing a dirge even as we speak.
However, this emotional argument is valid only in respect to assisted dying – not to the assisted dying bill. And I maintain that the two aren’t at all one and the same thing.
Here I must point out that, though physicians observe strict moral codes, theirs aren’t identical to those accepted by Lord Carey’s flock. When reciting the Penitential Act, Christians ask forgiveness for things they have done and things they have failed to do.
Both types of sin are equally grave but, as we move from church to hospital, the situation changes. There exists a whole world of ethical difference between a doctor killing a patient by a deliberate act or by passive acquiescence.
Active euthanasia occurs when a doctor or someone else deliberately does something that causes the patient to die. With passive euthanasia, death happens because the doctor deliberately doesn’t do, or stops doing, something necessary to keep the patient alive.
There also exists a grey area between active and passive euthanasia that is specifically relevant to Lord Carey’s concern about unbearable suffering. Doctors sometimes administer such a high dose of analgesic drugs that they know death may result. Then again, it may not, and in the eyes of the medical profession, they aren’t thereby committing active euthanasia.
Passive euthanasia has been practised since even before Asclepius, the god of medicine, assumed a seat next to his father Apollo. Physicians have always reserved the right to make a clinical decision to withdraw a useless treatment from a dying patient.
They practise every conceivable form of euthanasia by switching off life-support machines, deciding not to carry out a life-saving operation, refusing to prescribe palliative therapies that might add little to the lifespan but much to the suffering. This is how things are, how they’ve always been, and how they’ll for ever remain.
We may debate the ethics involved till the weeping relations come home, and personally I’m uneasy to see doctors assuming the divine powers of life and death. Then again, I’m also uneasy about, and reconciled to, the foul weather we’ve been having for weeks now. Some things just are.
Yet codifying assisted dying in a law is a bad idea. For laws don’t just prohibit or condone an action. They also carry the symbolic moral force of society’s values, its underlying philosophy. Some laws may be unenforced and unenforceable, but they stay on the books as a moral statement. A law – or in this case its absence – sends out a signal of the kind of society we are.
For example, until 1967 the British statute books included laws criminalising homosexuality. However, everyone knew it was widely practised, not least at public schools, and no one made much of a fuss about it: boys will be boys, or for that matter girls. The law was hardly ever enforced when the proscribed act occurred between consenting adults, and yet it was an important statement of society’s moral tenets rooted in Scripture.
The same goes for any laws legalising transsexuality. Gender dysphoria and bisexuality have been known and condoned at least since (now we trace things back to antiquity) the time of Dionysus, Apollo, Hermes, and Athena. Yet until now the state has never thrown its legal weight behind anti-Scriptural deviations (“male and female he made them”).
Any law legalising euthanasia will withdraw society’s commitment to the sanctity of human life, something Lord Carey holds dear. That alone is a powerful argument against such a law, and we haven’t even begun talking about slippery slopes, the thin ends of wedges and the potential for disgusting abuse.
Lord Carey dismisses that potential too cavalierly: “I have been disappointed to see the amount of fear-mongering they have marshalled in their arguments, adopting almost universally, the mantra that a ‘right to die, will become a duty to die’. This is in fact not true of places like Oregon which have had assisted dying laws for very many years…”
Show me your examples, sir, and I’ll show you mine, most of them coming from places like Holland and Belgium which also “have had assisted dying laws for very many years”.
One widely publicised case involved a woman of 74 suffering from Alzheimer’s who decided to be euthanised. The doctor put a sleeping pill into her coffee, and the woman dropped off. But when she woke up, she decided she didn’t want to die after all and began to kick and scream. But she was overpowered and killed anyway.
However, I promise not to cite such examples, and I have a large compendium of them, if Lord Carey makes a similar undertaking about his own. Let’s just keep the discussion down to the argument above. I think it’s both persuasive and sufficient.