Beachy Head Backfires
The Times' letters page received some thoughtful and intelligent letters in response to the recent opinion piece on assisted dying which suggests there are plenty of people, from a medical background or a religious persuasion, who disagree with the ugly and rather silly case made out by the columnist, Melanie Phillips.
The Beachy Head analogy has backfired in spectacular fashion, if you ask me.
If a disabled person in a wheelchair asked you to push them off Beachy Head, would you do so? Getty Images
Lord Falconer of Thoroton’s bill would usher in ‘a new dark age’, Melanie Phillips says
Sir, Lord Falconer of Thoroton’s bill will not, as your headline claims, “transform doctors into killers” (Melanie Phillips, Opinion, July 7).
A terminally ill patient, of sound mind and settled will, must be able to take a prescribed lethal drink themselves without assistance. They are not being pushed off the cliff, they are still voluntarily jumping. I do not regard that to help such patients in this way is doing them harm — quite the reverse. It is cruel for patients who find themselves in that situation to have to choose between a barbaric means for suicide or an expensive trip abroad. A majority of doctors would opt for an assisted death for themselves and having the means available.
As usual, the arguments mounted against assisted dying are for situations which would not be legalised by the bill soon to be debated in the House of Lords. In fact Melanie Phillips has sympathy with Lord Falconer’s intentions and agrees that those who break the current law should not be prosecuted. Surely this goes to the heart of why the Supreme Court has urged the legislators to look again at the current law.
Andrew Johns, FRCS
Bramley, Surrey
Sir, Melanie Phillips makes a misjudgment in expressing astonishment that a Church of England chaplain, Canon Rosie Harper, defends the Falconer bill. My experience as a congregational minister who spends much time in hospitals and hospices is that there is nothing sacred about the suffering that can be experienced by the terminally ill. Theologians may assert its heavenly merit, but clergy know its human cost. It also leads to considerable religious doubt, with questions by patients and relatives as to “how can a loving God allow this?”
We should give every protection to those who wish to carry on till their very last breath, but it is equally religious to allow those who are dying to choose when their life ends, if they prefer to avoid more weeks of agony or indignity. The Falconer bill is to be commended for offering both safeguards for the vulnerable and options for those who wish to have an assisted death. It is fully in keeping with religious principles that we heal when we can, comfort when we cannot, and help those who wish to gently give back to God the gift of life that has run its course and is no longer wanted.
Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain
Maidenhead Synagogue, Berks
Dying with Dignity (8 July 2014)
Melanie Phillips begins this opinion piece in The Times by accusing campaigners of manipulating language to reframe the debate around 'assisted dying', but then goes on herself to use the most emotive and pejorative descriptions of fellow citizens who wish to take control the situation when their lives are coming to an end.
So doctors are transformed into heartless killers and 'executioners' instead of being seen as helping patients to fulfil their last wishes which is the proper way to look at assisted dying, if you ask me.
The real issue is about putting proper safeguards in place to protect the vulnerable and that's where the medical profession has an obvious role, yet instead of dealing that point sensibly Melanie Phillips starts talking about a new dark age and of doctors pushing people in wheelchairs off Beachy Head.
I'll bet a pound to a penny that the basis of Melanie's opposition to assisted dying is her personal religious beliefs, yet nowhere is this mentioned in her article which I find strikingly dishonest.
If Melanie regards assisted dying as sinful, then let her say so openly because that will encourage an honest debate about whether people with strong religious beliefs should be allowed to impose their views on fellow citizens.
Assisted dying transforms doctors into killers
By Melanie Phillips - The Times
Lord Falconer’s draft law, which would allow the terminally ill to die, ushers in a new dark age
The House of Lords will shortly give a second reading to Lord Falconer of Thoroton’s assisted dying bill, which would allow doctors to help terminally ill patients to commit suicide if their life-expectancy is less than six months.
Attempts over the years to legalise “mercy killings” have all failed. Now opposition is softening, in part because of the way campaigners have manipulated the language in order to reframe the debate.
In a stroke of propaganda genius, the Voluntary Euthanasia Society renamed itself Dignity in Dying. Instantly, killing was transformed into dying. Killing is bad, but dying is inevitable. And people are frightened of dying in pain or distress.
The unconscionable was thus turned into the unstoppable. The seedy and sinister became enlightened and compassionate. Anyone who opposed “dying with dignity” was denounced as cruel.
However, suicide is not dying and assisted suicide is helping people to kill themselves. “Compassion in killing”, though, doesn’t have quite the same appeal. To put it another way, if you were walking on Beachy Head and encountered a disabled person in a wheelchair imploring you to push them over the edge, would you think it compassionate or callous to do so? The Falconer bill would enable doctors to do the equivalent of pushing the chair off the cliff.
Without doubt, there are cases of terminally ill people whose pain or distress make their lives unbearable. And campaigners such as Lord Falconer are indeed motivated by an admirable compassion for their plight. But while suicide is legal, no one has the right to turn someone else into an agent of killing. The Falconer bill would turn doctors into executioners, brutalising society in the process. The most vulnerable — the old, the very sick, the unloved — would feel intolerable pressure to end their lives. And some relatives who have financial or psychological interests in their death would likely be manipulating them too.
Experience abroad shows only too graphically how such a measure inevitably propels us down a slippery slope. Belgium has now bestowed the “right to die” on children as young as six. In the Netherlands, “voluntary” euthanasia quickly morphed into killing the mentally frail.
Lord Falconer’s report, on which his bill is based, implicitly suggested its own red line was permeable, stating that it would be unacceptable merely “at this point in time” to extend the right to assisted suicide to those who were not terminally ill.
As the wheelchair-bound Baroness Campbell observed, once society permits the deliberate procurement of someone’s death all bets are off. If this is permitted for the terminally ill, why not for those with chronic or progressive conditions? And if for them, why not for disabled people?
Legalising either euthanasia or assisted suicide brutalises society, because the loss of respect for life diminishes the life of every person.
This argument, however, cuts no ice in our consequentialist, utilitarian culture where there is no intrinsic value to anything. Instead, all is contingent on maximising general happiness, a view as deeply subjective and contestable as it is intolerant of any dissent.
So pervasive is this attitude that within the medical profession it has now even corrupted the basic tenet of the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm”. The BMJ supports the Falconer bill on the basis that people should be able to exercise “choice” about how and when they die; while Dr John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, has said: “We need an equivalent of a midwife at the end of life.”
Even in the Church of England, which emphatically opposes the bill, Canon Rosie Harper, chaplain to the bishop of Buckingham, not only supports it but asks: “In what way is there value in a person being technically still alive if they are sedated to the point of oblivion? I believe deeply in the sanctity of life — not half-life.”
But those who are sedated are not just “technically” alive. They are alive. Yet for Canon Harper, life that doesn’t meet certain conditions is worthy of no respect at all. When a canon of the church propounds such life-denying moral relativism, what hope is there for true empathy with the vulnerable?
Four years ago the director of public prosecutions issued guidelines that made clear that anyone who acted to help someone to die “out of compassion” was unlikely to be charged. Since then, about 90 such cases have been examined but with no prosecution.
That seems to me to be the proper balance between compassion for individuals and protection for society. Lord Falconer’s bill, although drafted with the best of intentions, would achieve neither and would take us instead into a darker age.
Lord Falconer’s draft law, which would allow the terminally ill to die, ushers in a new dark age
The House of Lords will shortly give a second reading to Lord Falconer of Thoroton’s assisted dying bill, which would allow doctors to help terminally ill patients to commit suicide if their life-expectancy is less than six months.
Attempts over the years to legalise “mercy killings” have all failed. Now opposition is softening, in part because of the way campaigners have manipulated the language in order to reframe the debate.
In a stroke of propaganda genius, the Voluntary Euthanasia Society renamed itself Dignity in Dying. Instantly, killing was transformed into dying. Killing is bad, but dying is inevitable. And people are frightened of dying in pain or distress.
The unconscionable was thus turned into the unstoppable. The seedy and sinister became enlightened and compassionate. Anyone who opposed “dying with dignity” was denounced as cruel.
However, suicide is not dying and assisted suicide is helping people to kill themselves. “Compassion in killing”, though, doesn’t have quite the same appeal. To put it another way, if you were walking on Beachy Head and encountered a disabled person in a wheelchair imploring you to push them over the edge, would you think it compassionate or callous to do so? The Falconer bill would enable doctors to do the equivalent of pushing the chair off the cliff.
Without doubt, there are cases of terminally ill people whose pain or distress make their lives unbearable. And campaigners such as Lord Falconer are indeed motivated by an admirable compassion for their plight. But while suicide is legal, no one has the right to turn someone else into an agent of killing. The Falconer bill would turn doctors into executioners, brutalising society in the process. The most vulnerable — the old, the very sick, the unloved — would feel intolerable pressure to end their lives. And some relatives who have financial or psychological interests in their death would likely be manipulating them too.
Experience abroad shows only too graphically how such a measure inevitably propels us down a slippery slope. Belgium has now bestowed the “right to die” on children as young as six. In the Netherlands, “voluntary” euthanasia quickly morphed into killing the mentally frail.
Lord Falconer’s report, on which his bill is based, implicitly suggested its own red line was permeable, stating that it would be unacceptable merely “at this point in time” to extend the right to assisted suicide to those who were not terminally ill.
As the wheelchair-bound Baroness Campbell observed, once society permits the deliberate procurement of someone’s death all bets are off. If this is permitted for the terminally ill, why not for those with chronic or progressive conditions? And if for them, why not for disabled people?
Legalising either euthanasia or assisted suicide brutalises society, because the loss of respect for life diminishes the life of every person.
This argument, however, cuts no ice in our consequentialist, utilitarian culture where there is no intrinsic value to anything. Instead, all is contingent on maximising general happiness, a view as deeply subjective and contestable as it is intolerant of any dissent.
So pervasive is this attitude that within the medical profession it has now even corrupted the basic tenet of the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm”. The BMJ supports the Falconer bill on the basis that people should be able to exercise “choice” about how and when they die; while Dr John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, has said: “We need an equivalent of a midwife at the end of life.”
Even in the Church of England, which emphatically opposes the bill, Canon Rosie Harper, chaplain to the bishop of Buckingham, not only supports it but asks: “In what way is there value in a person being technically still alive if they are sedated to the point of oblivion? I believe deeply in the sanctity of life — not half-life.”
But those who are sedated are not just “technically” alive. They are alive. Yet for Canon Harper, life that doesn’t meet certain conditions is worthy of no respect at all. When a canon of the church propounds such life-denying moral relativism, what hope is there for true empathy with the vulnerable?
Four years ago the director of public prosecutions issued guidelines that made clear that anyone who acted to help someone to die “out of compassion” was unlikely to be charged. Since then, about 90 such cases have been examined but with no prosecution.
That seems to me to be the proper balance between compassion for individuals and protection for society. Lord Falconer’s bill, although drafted with the best of intentions, would achieve neither and would take us instead into a darker age.
