Latest news with #assistedsuicide
New York Times
22-07-2025
- Health
- New York Times
The Perverse Economics of Assisted Suicide
In June, lawmakers in my native country, Britain, approved plans to legalize assisted suicide. If the bill becomes law, England and Wales will join more than a dozen countries and 11 U.S. states in permitting medically assisted dying. Every one of these jurisdictions has a total fertility rate below the replacement threshold. I do not think this is a coincidence. About 30 years ago, P.D. James's prescient novel 'The Children of Men' imagined that a birthrate crisis would induce governments to facilitate the suicides of the elderly in a ritual known as 'the Quietus.' Looking at the rush among some low fertility countries to legalize assisted suicide, I fear that Ms. James's vision is already being realized. Our fertility predicament is not as extreme as that imagined in 'The Children of Men,' but it is nonetheless very real. The global total fertility rate has more than halved since 1950, with those of most countries already below replacement level. The population pyramid is increasingly inverted, not just in the wealthiest Western nations but also in most places outside Africa. This poses an existential threat to welfare systems, which rely on young workers to fund entitlements and health care for older adults. Those who hope that liberal immigration policies will solve this problem forget that immigrants themselves get old, and their birthrates tend to converge with those of the greater population over time. If birthrates do not recover — and at present, they show no real signs of doing so — eventually we will be forced to revert to the system that prevailed for all of human history up until recently: Older people will be cared for privately, typically by their children and grandchildren, and those without families will have to rely on charities, such as they are. In the meantime, we are in a period of transition. Welfare states limp on, but in conditions of increasing stress. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Church of England, Disestablish Thyself
The Church of England has always been a hybrid entity. Since its establishment by King Henry VIII in 1534, the church has adroitly juggled piety with politics to conserve its role as Britain's moral center. Yet last week Parliament passed two policies so rebarbative to the Christian principle of human dignity—the decriminalization of self-administered abortion at any time, for any reason, and the legalization of assisted suicide for the terminally ill—that even this adaptable church will struggle to reconcile them with its mission. Christian doctrine prizes the dignity of all and the duty to care for the vulnerable. Early Christians were noted for rescuing unwanted babies, routinely abandoned in Roman times. Through European history the establishment of hospitals and houses for poor relief was associated with the Christian faith.
Daily Mail
23-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
ROSA MONCKTON: Why I'll fight in the Lords against this breathtakingly cruel and ignorant assisted suicide Bill
Last week in the House of Commons we saw two measures passed: the first licensing women to abort at up to full term, the second enabling the state to participate in, and even encourage, suicide for the terminally ill. There is a terrible symmetry here, and a bleak message – that life at its beginning, and at its end, is worthless. As the mother of an adult with a learning disability I am petrified by the lack of protection for vulnerable people in the assisted suicide Bill. You spend much of your life as a parent of a disabled child fighting for the necessary support, for the right school, the therapists, a specialist college. Every time you think you can take a breath and relax, the next milestone and hurdle awaits. You worry endlessly. The biggest concern for every parent is what will happen when we are dead. Who will look after our 'child', who will understand their needs, care for them in the right way and facilitate their way through life? But now, to add to that worry, is another enormous and unspeakable question – how can we stop them being killed? I cannot believe that I am having to write these words. Yet the assisted suicide Bill makes no special provision whatsoever for this disenfranchised group. How have we got to this place, where some lives are valued more than others? Many people with a learning disability are vulnerable. My own 30-year-old daughter, Domenica, who has Down's syndrome – and loves life – is highly suggestible and would intuit what her interlocutor wanted to hear, without understanding what she would be agreeing to. Yet in law she has what is called 'capacity'. The Bill is flawed on so many levels: the fact that no one on the death panel has to have any knowledge of the individual, the fact that hospices and care homes that do not want to be involved in assisted suicide will have no protection in law and the fact that their government funding could be based on participation. Where does that sit with the ethos of Dame Cicely Saunders, who founded the hospice movement? A movement based on the principle of care: 'You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die.' She also said: 'Suffering is only intolerable when nobody cares.' People who work in hospices do care, and the hospices that I have visited and am involved with are wonderful, positive and life-affirming places. Those who work in these hospices who do not approve of assisted suicide – which is almost all of them – will probably leave the palliative care profession. And where does that leave us? With people who want to end the lives of others, not care to the end. All legislators – of which I am one, in the House of Lords – should be considering the weakest and most vulnerable when making momentous, and in this case, literal, life and death decisions. The Bill as it stands has no special protection for people like my daughter. This is something that rightly troubles the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, too. Explaining his decision to vote against the Bill in a Facebook post aimed at his constituents, he said: 'I can't get past the concerns expressed by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Physicians, the Association for Palliative Medicine and a wide range of charities representing under-privileged groups in our society about the risks that come with this Bill.' Among the many amendments rejected by the committee set up by the sponsor of the bill, Kim Leadbeater MP, were safeguards to protect people with Down's syndrome – an amendment which should have included all people with a learning disability or autism. The committee, of which the great majority were backers of the Bill, rejected by 13 to eight to exclude special support for those with Down's syndrome when discussing assisted suicide. How could this possibly be considered acceptable? Was there not one of those 13 with experience of what it is to have a learning disability; no understanding of how much specialised knowledge and interpretation is needed? If anyone mentions death or dying to my daughter, she immediately becomes acutely anxious and troubled. The deaths we have had in our family have traumatised her. The thought of a stranger telling her that to kill herself would be an option if she has a terminal illness is so frightening and chilling that it makes me cry, and the fact this could all happen without any of her family being informed – as the Bill enables – is breathtakingly cruel and ignorant. But above all else it makes me angry. Angry at the lack of rigour in this bill. Angry at the lack of understanding of people with learning disabilities. Angry at the implicit assumption that their lives are not worth the same as the rest of the population. We saw it during the Covid pandemic, when the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which provides guidance to the NHS and the social care sector, divided the population into different categories and advised how each should be treated. Category 7 was defined as 'completely dependent for personal care, from whatever cause, physical or cognitive. Even so, they seem stable and at no risk of dying'. That would have covered my daughter. Categories 7 to 9 were to be denied lifesaving treatment. Legislators have a duty to be rigorous and fair. You cannot make laws because Dame Esther Rantzen lobbied the Prime Minister, or because someone's granny had an avoidably terrible death. This should never have been a Private Member's Bill. It has not had the scrutiny or the parliamentary time necessary for such a momentous change in the way we live and die. It is a law for the strong and determined against the weak and the vulnerable. All of us in Parliament should know which of those needs the most protection.
Telegraph
21-06-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Diane Abbott is both an old Leftie and a true Tory
Whenever MPs legislate some monstrosity, we are often assured that the debate reflected 'the House of Commons at its best', as though an odious bill is rendered less odious by everyone having observed parliamentary niceties. Anyone seeking such solace after the approval of Kim Leadbeater's Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill will have a search on their hands. Friday's debate only confirmed what a wretched, incurious and insubstantial Parliament we have, with few exceptions. One of them is Diane Abbott, the Mother of the House. She used her allotted time to make one final plea to her colleagues not to take the NHS into the killing business. It was a speech both practical and humanist but marked above all by scepticism. Abbott lodged no religious objection. She is not, she pointed out, implacably opposed to assisted suicide; she simply could not vote for such a dangerously flawed piece of legislation. Abbott spoke a language Leadbeater displays no fluency in: doubt. She told MPs she 'would not put my life, or the life of anyone dear to me, in the hands of a panel of officials'. As for those who asserted that assisted suicide would always be voluntary, she accused the Bill's supporters of failing to consider people primed to defer to authority, who would 'think that, because their doctor raises it with them at all, they are being guided in that direction'. Pro-suicide MPs might not 'take seriously' such concerns but 'anyone who knows how institutions work should be watchful of it'. Here was a socialist warning against excessive deference to public sector bureaucrats and sainted NHS doctors. She showed an up-close understanding of the state's flaws that could only come from someone who has spent a career advocating state intervention. There is no conservative like an old Leftie. The MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington says she came into politics with hopes of being 'a voice for the voiceless'. Who, she asked her colleagues to imagine, 'could be more voiceless than somebody who is in their sick bed and believes that they are dying?' We all probably know someone who doesn't want to make a fuss or be a burden on their loved ones. 'Within the family,' Abbott said, 'the most powerful coercion is silence: it is the failure to answer when a question is put'. How many people will fall silent and go along with what they imagine to be in the best interests of the people around them? We are about to find out. What we can take a guess at is the demographic profile of those who will respond in this way. It will be older women, socialised to put their husband and children first. Women from minority religious and ethnic backgrounds, communities where it is traditional for men to do the talking and the decision-making and for women to be talked to and have final decisions presented to them. Such people exist beyond the ken of a House of Commons populated by privileged graduate professionals, those who, in Abbott's words, 'have for the entirety of their adult life been confident in dealing with authority and institutions'. What about those who don't share that confidence? When you legislate with only Esther Rantzen in mind, you're going to overlook a lot of people. Diane Abbott didn't just give a good speech. MPs give good speeches all the time. She took a stand at an hour of great moral failing and made the case for social conscience at a time of personal vanity. When a future Parliament comes to reckon with what this Parliament has done, it will look back with contempt upon a fit of callousness posing as compassion.
Wall Street Journal
17-06-2025
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
Assisted Suicide Heralds a Culture of Despair
Your editorial 'New York's Assisted-Suicide Mistake' (June 11) captures what many of us have experienced up close. My grandfather James Powell helped pass the nation's first 'death with dignity' law in Oregon, occasionally appearing in TV ads in support of the measure. Years later, after an agonizing battle with lymphoma, he drank a lethal dose of barbiturates, prescribed by a physician. I was there along with many family members, and while I remember my grandpa with overwhelming affection, his last act has always struck me as wrong. How to describe the feeling of watching your hero kill himself, being watched by his family, those ordinarily expected to protect him? I can't help but reflect on how there were hours left unlived, words left unsaid, kisses left unshared. We were poorer for his choice and so, I think, was he. It is ironic that many people who oppose capital punishment, war and other state-sanctioned violence support euthanasia. Their ethic inevitably falls back on 'choice' and 'autonomy' as its ultimate visions of moral good. Never mind that these two things will inevitably be taken from us. The shape of our final days, months or even years are inexplicably valuable. They have the potential to enrich others' lives in ways we can't anticipate.
