Assisted Dying

This is a very personal view below. I’m not in favour of introducing voluntary euthanasia and at the same time just like everyone else, I can imagine circumstances in which it would be an option. The main point I’m making is that the debate in parliament did not come close to giving due cognisance to the issues.

There’ll be those that say, indeed did say, that parliament was at its best in debating the assisted dying bill. I profoundly disagree. I felt it was timid, superficial and overly sanitised. I’m not sure the significance of what they were doing was embodied in the debate .

Societies of all creeds and none have rejected suicide since time immemorial. The fact of the repulsion being so universal suggests something deeper than scripture. Suicide challenges us both in imputing those who survive and in the abandonment of our shared life journeys. I don’t know anything more guaranteed to provoke introspection than the suicide of an acquaintance, no matter how distant.

There were those in Friday’s debate that wanted to somehow make the act of ending one’s life something different than suicide. There was even a point of order to say that the use of the word suicide was offensive. They didn’t say what the correct words were, or why it was not suicide, just that suicide was an offensive word. This particular snapshot encapsulated the superficiality of the whole debate, the word ‘suicide’ was frowned upon, ‘euthanasia’ was mentioned only once and the method of assisting death (killing themself) hardly touched upon. How can this tiptoeing around the issues be a serious engagement with the subject?

We really need to be asking ourselves; why now? It’s not as though the pain and indignity at the end of life only began in the new millennium. What is it about our generation that says we want control over our death? Why is the taboo over suicide breaking down now? There may be good answers to all these but I didn’t hear them during the debate.

I wanted to hear more about how we’re going to avoid creating new taboos. Are we entering a period where choosing to let nature take its course will be frowned upon? The infirm should think of all the work we’re putting on the medical profession and our families. Isn’t it just irresponsible not to ask for the poison?

The Dutch Health minister who introduced euthanasia to the Netherlands later regretted rushing through the legislation there. By 2017 it accounted for nearly one in 20 deaths. Canada is not far behind. The Netherlands experience probably tells us that this will become normal here. Opinion polls suggest the public wants it. I get that. But that’s no reason for parliament to be so saccharine in weighing up the issues.