What sort of government votes to let doctors kill with impunity?

  • The Assisted Dying Debate


(On Friday November 29) a majority of MPs at Westminster voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which is to say that the UK Parliament has now approved the principle of assisted suicide – death at the hands of the state. There is a small window of hope that it will be defeated the next time around, but in reality a momentum has built up that will be very hard to resist.

About thirty other jurisdictions in the world have legalised assisted suicide. Much was made by the supporters of the bill that the UK was not adopting their legislation but framing its own. But that hides a dark truth, which is that there is no legislation that has adequately managed to write in the necessary safeguards.

The debate itself contained both disinformation and inspiration. In a powerful speech against the Bill, Danny Kruger MP, an Evangelical Christian, lamented that the application papers for assisted suicide could be signed as a proxy by somebody who had never even met the patient, but instead occupied the vaguest credentials imaginable: somebody in “good public standing”. This could cover anyone from the pharmacist around the corner to a librarian in another part of the country.


Immediately a supporter of the Bill stood up and said that Mr Kruger’s assertion wasn’t true. The small print of the Bill said that any proxy signature had to be from somebody who had known the applicant for two years. Mr Kruger complained that if this was the case his memory was at fault, but in any case this ought not to be a matter of doubt. A Bill should not be placed before the Commons with such haste that important matters were unclear.

As it happens, Mr Kruger was right. He gave way to another speaker who, unlike most of the MPs debating the issue, actually had the text in front of him. He read from the Bill; it was exactly as Mr Kruger had said. The proxy could either have known the applicant for two years, or never have met them or heard of them – as long as they were “of good standing” in the eyes of the state.

This should have chilled the blood of anybody who heard it. Mr Kruger continued to expose the harsh reality that the proponents of the Bill were proposing to make legal and sought to mask. He talked about doctors in Canada who personally kill hundreds of patients a year in their special clinics and make a professional living out of it. There was fury on the other side in response.

“If honourable members have a difficulty with the language,” Mr Kruger responded, “then I wonder what they’re doing here. This is what we are talking about. This really is what we’re talking about. Far too many so-called ‘honourable’ members in the House of Commons have dishonoured themselves and our nation. They want nice clean bureaucratic language to cover up their evil. That’s why they are groaning when someone stands up and uses language that actually describes the evil in plain terms.”

Few pieces of legislation can be presented in such a stark form as constituting good versus evil. At the heart of his speech Mr Kruger summed up the case for real humanitarian concern and tenderness as opposed to the self-indulgent demands of the haut bourgeoisie to decide how and when someone should die – irrespective of the effects on anybody else, and particularly the less articulate and more vulnerable.

Mr Kruger insisted that “we also need to think in real human terms what the effect would be on the choices of other people. And I don’t mean the people who are used to getting their way. I’m talking about the people who lack agency; the people who know what it is to be excluded from power, to have decisions made for them by big wigs in distant offices speaking a language they don’t understand.”

These were not, he said, “the people who are campaigning for changing the law, but the people who come to our surgeries with their lives in tatters. ”What are the safeguards for them? I will tell you. We are the safeguard. This place. This Parliament. You and me. We are the people who protect the most vulnerable in society from harm and if we stand on the brink of abandoning that role."

With less rhetoric power but equally compassionate insight Sir Edward Leigh MP, a Catholic and the Father of the House, asked: “What sort of society are we? Are we a society that loves life, that loves caring, that loves the hospice movement? Or are we a society which believes that there is despair?”

But by a majority of fifty five, the House of Commons voted in favour of a piece of legislation that will change the nature of the social contract. It will change the relationship between doctors and patients, the people and a state which may decide they are economically and functionally disposable, and members of families where care gives way to convenience.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that a society and a legislature that closes its eyes to the horror of abortion and the way in which the practice of abortion escaped the legal scrutiny of the legislation that enabled it, closes it eyes to other aspects of the sanctity of life, at the end rather than just at the beginning.

The vote involved, as Danny Kruger warned, the crossing of a Rubicon. It may have been a small river in terms of scale and geography, but it turned out to be a place of profound change for the future of the history of a people. Parliament has expressed a preference for death and convenience over life and the opportunities to love. Kyrie eleison.

The Catholic Herald here