I recently attended memorial services for two friends. Both died after long illnesses, and the services were naturally sad. But the subsequent receptions were uplifting. Two lives were celebrated by those who had shared them. Achievements were praised and loved ones recalled. All agreed on one tragedy: that the subjects were absent from an occasion that would have made their departures – and their lives – complete.
One day I know a more generous Britain will allow us to choose when to die and whether to hold such celebrations ourselves. They will seem as normal as birth and marriage. We might be impeded by illness or age, but we could say goodbye to family and friends in good order and to our own timetable. We could savour with those we love the meaning and pleasure we derived from our life on Earth, with the science of medicine to make it tolerable.
This week’s debate on the assisted dying bill is a reversion to the dark ages. It is being conducted as if it were some dangerous and radical move into unknown territory. Britain used to consider itself a progressive country. Now on one area after another – drugs, imprisonment, mental health – it is not. On assisted dying it is now behind the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium. What is the matter with us?
All the “problems” raised by opponents of the bill are answered by regimes abroad. The best case is probably Australia’s state of Victoria, which has similar safeguards to those proposed in England and Wales. There has been no outbreak of suicides, no signs of coercion, no lack of palliatives, no need for Britain’s proposed absurdity of requiring signoff by a judge. Other countries – many with a similar approach to democratic liberties to Britain’s – find they can guard against the risk of coercion while respecting individual freedom of choice. Yet we discuss this as if Britain were on Mars.
Too much of the discussion draws on religion. This cannot be just. Imposing religious doctrine on a largely secular country is archaic. A joint letter by 29 faith leaders against the legislation was published last weekend, while the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has said her faith was the “start point” for her opposition to the issue (though she emphasised in a letter to her constituents that she “would never impose my religious beliefs on anyone else”).
For most British people, death is an act not of God but of nature, and an act that we can in some degree regulate. For that we can study other countries. The reality is that we can now alleviate the pain, the indignity and the misery of most illnesses throughout our lives. Assisted dying enables us to extend that avoidance to the suffering so often involved in death.
I accept that death is in a different category from illness, but we can in some degree choose its timing and so make it less cruel. Some may prefer not to, and that is their choice. I cannot see why they should deny the same choice to others.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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