Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Assisted Dying, what is it? Assisted Suicide is the proper description. AD=Usurpation of a term.
Dignity, what is it? An organisation which assists people to commit suicide and campaigns for it to be made legal. ‘Dignitas’ = Usurpation of a word for tendentious purposes.
Easy to make out a case on compassionate grounds for putting to death someone suffering and destined to die soon. Why? Compassion sounds good, and the case for assisted suicide sounds perfectly compassionate. Surely safeguards can be put in place? What safeguards can be certain to last? But how does anyone know when someone will die? In my experience many expected to die soon last a long time, while the opposite also is true. Even doctors have only a informed power of guessing.
Every few years someone attempts to change the current and very well-established law which proclaims that to assist another person to commit suicide is a crime. Yet so often in the past it has failed. The last time was when a former MP in this constituency introduced such a bill.
Think of abortion: in 1967 this was lade legal and we were told it would only be safe and rare and in exceptional circumstances of danger to a mother’s life. Yet for years it has been virtually ‘on demand’. I remember the first time I heard the name ‘Keir Starmer’. It was when he was DPP and refused to prosecute certain doctors who were blatantly breaking the law by signing certificates permitting abortion on women on the grounds of mental health when they had never even seen the women concerned – just because certain persons wanted abortion for convenience.
So in the case of euthaniasia/assisted suicide. It may begin with safeguards, with clear limits in law, but what about pressure put on a dying person to stop using up resources uselessly? What about pressure from relations who want to get hold of an elderly relative’s property?
There is another such assisted suicide bill about to be introduced into Parliament. and there is a greater chance that it will be passed this time, given the range of views among the MPs elected to the Commons last July. The most atheistic and anti-life parliament ever in our history.
Now although it is the case that whenever such a change in the law has been rejected in the past, as was the case with Marris’s Bill in 2016, this never stops the proposers of euthanasia from continuing to keep up the pressure. And they are well supported by the supposedly neutral BBC.
Yet even though the proposers of assisted suicide continue to present bill after bill in Parliamnet until such time as the law finally is changed, will a bill opposing suicide ever be allowed afterwards? Think again about abortion.
The pro-suicide lobby insist that their proposals are measured and limited and appeal to compassion t justify their planned change to the law. But in reality all such protections are gradually removed. Remember conscience clauses or doctors and nurses opposed to abortion? Where are they now? Now you can’t even publicly opposed abortion without the serious risk of being sent to jail, and even without saying a single word! Yes, Isabel Vaughan Spruce, the fearless campaigner against abortion was compensated after two wrongful arrests, but think of Adam Smith Connor. He has not only been arrested for the same alleged ‘crime’, but sent to prison.
If the assisted suicide bill is passed, then the same will happen to anyone who opposes euthanasia some time in the future, and I predict it won’t be very long. Just as being anti-abortion has now become seen as fanatical and socially unacceptable, so too will being anti-assisted suicide in the future.
In fact, it is already happening on the quiet in hospitals. People who are seriously ill and in a coma which won’t permit them to speak, are being starved to death. This was the Liverpool pathway of a few years ago. But although there was an outcry against it and it was stopped, it just went underground and changed its name. Hospitals are still killing patients who are deemed unworthy of living any longer.
So it will be very easy to argue that people who are ill, whether dying or not, but are using up the valuable costly resources of the NHS, people who are depressed or feel guilty that they are a burden on their families, all these should accept the inevitable and allow themselves to be euthanised.
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