Off the old and the infirm

“Please remember: be careful what you wish for. The right to die can become a duty to die.”

So wrote Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, in a letter to Catholic parishes. Britain’s senior Catholic cleric urged people to write to their MPs and oppose the assisted dying bill to be debated in the Commons next month.

In the medical profession, he added, we could witness “a slow change from a duty to care to a duty to kill.” His Grace is right to issue this call, even though (I’m tempted to say ‘because’) most people disagree.

In a recent poll, two-thirds of the respondents supported the bill, with only 20 per cent opposing it. Since Catholics make up only 8.3 per cent of the population, one clearly doesn’t have to share His Grace’s faith to find oneself in the moral minority.

This stands to reason. The case against doctors legally killing patients doesn’t have to rely on denominational affiliation to be solid. In fact, it can be made without a single reference to divine authority, although perhaps not by a prelate who has to stay within his remit.

His Grace proved that by using the thin-end-of-the-wedge argument: if euthanasia becomes legal, sooner or later it will become compulsory. Doctors will start killing more and more people, either of their own accord or under pressure from suffering patients and their families.

The bill would allow terminally ill adults within six months of death to seek something incongruously called medical help: suicide by doctor. This proposal has holes big enough to drive an ambulance through.

To begin with, in many cases doctors don’t know how long a terminal patient has left to live, or whether he is indeed terminal. Take it from me, for I’m a dead man writing.

Some 20 years ago no one thought I’d survive my Stage 4 cancer. A consultant stereotypically named Donald McDonald told me: “Your prognosis is poor.” Since his accent was also stereotypical, the death sentence sounded more like “Your prognersis is pure”, but I understood.

Under the terms of the proposed bill, that would have made me eligible for a lethal injection, and something in Dr McDonald’s dour delivery suggested he would have been happy to administer it. That would have deprived you of the subsequent decades of my vituperation.

You might say that, since I didn’t specifically ask to be killed, I was off limits. Ideally, you’d be right, but in this life we aren’t blessed with ideal situations. People are fallible, and the more their fallibility is encouraged, the worse it gets.

The experience of Holland, which in 2000 became the first previously civilised country to legalise euthanasia, shows that doctors have quite a bit of latitude on the issue of consent. For example, one Alzheimer patient there asked to be euthanised. However, at the last moment she decided she didn’t want to die after all and began to kick and scream. But she was overpowered and killed anyway.

As to the sheer numbers, in 2022 there were 8,720 reported cases of euthanasia in Holland, an increase of 1,000 on the previous year. By now the annual death list must have grown into five digits, though it must still be lagging behind Canada, where one in 20 deaths is caused by assisted suicide.

Advocates of the bill insist that nothing like that can possibly happen in Britain, which strikes me as jingoistic. Such people insist, on little evidence, that Britons are so much more sensible than Canadians that euthanasia would be practised only in extreme cases, when the patient is suffering badly and the doctor can guarantee that the poor chap won’t last beyond six months. That strikes me as ignorant.

For exactly the same things were said in 1967, when the Abortion Act was passed. Though abortion was – and remains – still illegal, the new law provided a legal defence for the woman and her doctor in some exceptional cases, specifically when the woman’s physical and mental health was at stake.

That was de jure. De facto, however, any woman can now claim mental anguish at the very thought of having a baby and get an abortion on demand at up to 24 weeks of gestation. Some 250,000 take advantage of the opportunity every year, turning abortion into just another form of contraception.

The wedge only showed its thin end in 1967, but those with some moral sense and understanding of human nature were trying to stop that outrage by reminding people of the overall shape of that tool. They were shouted down just as opponents of the euthanasia bill will be shouted down now.

The bill will certainly pass, and an ever-accelerating cull of wrinklies will begin. If the example of Canada, Holland and Belgium is anything to go by, the notions of both unbearable suffering and terminal diseases will be constantly inflated, until they explode into deadly shards. Patients suffering from, say, clinical depression will be deemed proper candidates for the needle, as they are in those countries already.

Now I’m going to contradict what I said earlier by mentioning God, but only tangentially. You don’t have to espouse any religion to know that both our morality and legality have Judaeo-Christian antecedents. These days most people may not know this, but that’s the basis of all the laws protecting our persons and property.

The injunction against the taking of a life without due process is perhaps the most seminal of such laws, and surely even rank atheists must know this. They may not agree that, since it’s God who gives us life, only he can take it away. However, they – and many generations of their families – grew up with the understanding that a human life is inviolable.

Eroding this understanding will have far-reaching and, what’s worse, unpredictable social consequences by numbing people’s minds and cauterising their moral sense. A society may withstand chipping away at some of its traditional structures, but it won’t survive undermining its own foundations.

Interestingly, the same people who are fanatically committed to both abortion and euthanasia invoke the sanctity of human life whenever the subject of the death penalty comes up. They offer all sorts of spurious arguments, usually citing the possibility of forensic error leading to an irreversible punishment.

That possibility can be reduced to zero by, for example, tightening the required standard of proof in cases where the death penalty is on the table. Changing ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ to ‘beyond all doubt’ would eliminate the possibility of an innocent man being executed, while preserving the social benefits of justice done and seen to be done.

The only argument against the death penalty that I find valid is the corrupting effect it has on the executioner. A man whose job is to kill defenceless people, even if he does so legally and they richly deserve their fate, has to suffer some psychological damage. He is thus punished without due process, something that our jurisprudence abhors.

Now, if this argument works (and I do think it has some merit) for someone whose job is to kill, surely it works even better for someone whose job is to treat. Turning doctors into executioners has to corrupt them and the whole society, and it may find the ensuing erosion unbearable.

However, abortion on demand and euthanasia have become articles of progressive faith, and there’s no point arguing against the proposed bill on merit or by appealing to traditional morality. Those two-thirds of the population who support the bill don’t do so because they’ve carefully weighed the pros and cons. They do so because they’ve been brainwashed to hate traditional morality for being just that, traditional.

This is called anomie, and it’s the dominant condition of modernity. Now, that’s what I call a terminal disease, and it has become endemic.