A death bill deservedly dies

British pro-life activists have been practicing a catchy slogan in opposition to a bill that would legalize assisted suicide: “Kill the bill, not the ill.” They got their wish. After a year and a half of debate, the bill’s parliamentary clock ran out on April 24, as it finally fell without a final vote in the House of Lords. Co-sponsors Kim Leadbeater and Lord Falconer are planning a desperate bid to overrule the Lords by invoking the Parliament Act, but no one expects them to succeed. For all intents and purposes, the death bill is dead. For now.

Intended to make suicide an option for the terminally ill, the bill had already been passed in the House of Commons. But the Lords were unsatisfied that it contained enough safeguards against coercion for people made additionally vulnerable by factors like disability or poverty. Leadbeater was incensed that they had the audacity to propose various amendments instead of simply accepting the bill as-is. “That isn’t what democracy looks like,” she huffed in a peeved speech for BBC Breakfast, calling some of the amendments “quite cruel.”

Her reaction was telling, as were the arguments made on the floor by co-sponsor Lord Falconer. While addressing the amendment designed to protect poor patients, Falconer argued from a perniciously twisted idea of justice that they shouldn’t be “barred” from “having an assisted death.” This is the predictable pattern of the pro-death lobby, and it’s consistent with the belief that assisted suicide is an absolute good, no less than actual medical care. By the same logic, European nations like Belgium and the Netherlands have slid all the way down the slippery slope to legalized suicide for children. 

That fanaticism separates the “true believers” in assisted suicide from people who aren’t unilaterally opposed but feel nervous about over-expansion with shades of coercion. It’s possible that the U.K. bill could have passed had the sponsors accepted the amendments, showing that the opposition was more complicated than a pure rejection on principle. However, debate can be clarifying for people who haven’t quite realized that while such things are marketed as “free choice,” choice inevitably devours itself. You could hear the astonishment in Lord Harper’s voice as he responded to Falconer: “Is he … is he really saying that … he’s okay with poor people ending their lives with the assistance of others because they’re poor? Because that is what it sounds like.”

Leadbeater has also drawn fire for opining that her bill was “a bit like gay marriage,” in that it was about a strictly private, personal choice that should be no one else’s business. Those among the bill’s opponents who identify as gay naturally took special offense. However, there is a deeper sense in which Leadbeater wasn’t wrong. The defenders of assisted suicide and of gay marriage will argue with similar insistence, similarly wrongly, that these “private, personal” choices have no effect on the polity. By the natural light, it is obvious that they do, which is why Christians continue to oppose them.

Fortunately, Leadbeater’s bill set off alarm bells for many religiously and politically neutral organizations, including the Royal Colleges of Psychiatrists and Physicians and other advocacy groups. All the experts agreed that despite the supposed “safeguards,” it was anything but safe. Some peers related their personal experience of disability and illness, including Baroness Campbell, who addressed the House remotely while breathing through a ventilator. Campbell has previously emphasized that as an atheist, she doesn’t oppose the bill on religious grounds.

However, peers like Baroness Prentis have grounded their position in their faith. On Friday, Prentis gave a powerful testimony of cancer survival that didn’t shy from the grim realities of chemotherapy, nor from an honest admission of the allure that a clean, peaceful assisted suicide could hold for people in such a position. But, she said emphatically, “We owe the dying better.” Christianity wasn’t explicitly mentioned in her speech, but it had a particular glow to it that made me unsurprised to learn her background.

By sad contrast, former TV presenter Sophie Blake put out an angry personal appeal on the other side, weaponizing her Stage 4 cancer diagnosis to condemn the “small group of unelected peers” who have “chosen to impose their personal beliefs on terminally ill adults, condemning many to suffer against their will.” She said she had hoped to avail herself of the law when her time came, and she now fears a death beyond her control.

As Prentis’s testimony demonstrates, no one is immune to this fear, including Christians, but Christians have the wherewithal to confront it differently. We have seen a particularly poignant example of how Christians confront death in Sen. Ben Sasse’s choice to “die in public.” As important as it is to make logical arguments against assisted suicide, it is no less important to demonstrate the better path by living example. We acknowledge that “In the midst of life, we are in death.” At the same time, like Prentis and Sasse, we can show the world what it means to have life more abundant.