The Church and assisted suicide

The news that George Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has come out in favor of assisted suicide in the United Kingdom should be a shock but not a surprise. It’s a shock because the Church should be the place where life is considered sacred, and anything that compromises that should be rejected. It’s not a surprise because the Church of England has a long record of being on the progressive side of politics, albeit always a few years behind the general cultural consensus.

In a society where personal happiness (defined typically as a sense of psychological well-being) has become the single most important moral imperative, some institutions inevitably move to new positions of power and influence while others decline or transform. Entertainment and medicine would be the most significant of the former, the one distracting us from the boredom or burdens of our lives, the other alleviating our pains and suffering. With medicine, however, it is not simply the case that it has become more important to society and enhanced the power of those industries with which it is connected, such as pharmaceutical companies, it has also been transformed. Gone are the Hippocratic days when the doctor swore not to administer poisons or abortifacients nor abuse the body. Ours is a time when the tide in moral imperatives flows in the exact opposite direction. Christian medical ethicist Farr Curlin characterizes the underlying shift as that from the art of medicine, of caring for the whole person based on objective criteria, to the provision of services, increasingly understood in subjective, therapeutic terms.

And now we see the Church—or at least some Church leaders like Carey—doing the same. Carey sees a deep inconsistency in allowing the terminally ill to refuse life-extending treatment but refusing them the option of choosing what would actively kill them. But there is a huge difference between allowing a disease to take its course and terminating a life. For those with minds shaped by the exaltation of autonomy and the therapeutic intuitions of our contemporary culture, the distinction may not be clear.

One must never minimize the suffering of the terminally ill. Every single case is a painful tragedy for the person and the loved ones involved. Care and compassion are non-negotiable in such situations. But the move to assisted suicide is of more consequence than simply bringing to a swift end the agony of the patient. In a society where assisted suicide can be imagined as a plausible, even perhaps attractive, option for those in pain, a shift has already taken place concerning society’s moral imagination. It has become deeply therapeutic and enamored with human instead of divine authority and autonomy. And that means that the criteria for deciding whether a life is worth living are already fluid.

There is an analogy here with societies that allow abortion. The arguments from rape and incest have a powerful emotional punch, but to accept them, one has already conceded a principle that cannot be contained within such narrow boundaries: The baby in the womb has no intrinsic value or rights. In a similar vein, assisted dying for those in the agony of, say, cancer’s last weeks cannot be confined to such physical suffering because it carries with it the legitimation of other assumptions concerning what it means to be human: autonomy, control, and a subjective right to decide if a life is worth living. That not only sets the stage for me to decide whether my life is worth living on the grounds I choose but also to decide if the lives of others are worth living, especially those who are incompetent to make their own decisions or can be coerced into agreeing with my assessment. But for a Christian, such claims to power and control over my life and the lives of others belong finally and only to God, in whose image we are made. And when the Church addresses end-of-life care for the terminally ill, it cannot do so at the cost of erasing what it means to be human.

Carey’s motives are no doubt of the highest order: a desire to aid the weak and the suffering in their hour of need. But assisted suicide, whatever its motivation, denies the value of human life. That leaders of the Church, those responsible above all others for teaching what it means to be human, are now party to this is a tragic dereliction—no, repudiation—of God-given duty.