There’s a growing expectation that the U.K. will follow down the path taken by Canada, the Netherlands and Belgium and introduce euthanasia during the next Parliament.
Personally, if appropriate safeguards against the exploitation of the vulnerable can be guaranteed and providing that the decision to cut short a life is made by the patient or, where he or she lacks capacity, the next of kin (on the condition that this person genuinely has the person’s best interests at heart), then I’d support such a change. However, I have two reservations. Firstly, I suspect once euthanasia is introduced it will gradually morph into the situation where, rather than the individual (or next of kin) making the decision, it will be the state deciding when your time is up. And secondly, I don’t think such a fundamental change to our way of life should be taken in Parliament; such a decision could only have legitimacy if it was put to a referendum. This is a game we all have skin in, we should all be party to the decision.
If you’re looking for an article that covers the morality of assisted suicide, then this isn’t it. Far better read Kevin Yuill in Spiked, Matthew Parris in the Spectator or Tim Stanley in the Telegraph. Should you want an even more learned opinion turn to Lord Sumption’s piece in the Telegraph. Each puts his case far more eloquently than I ever could. I want to focus on some of the bumps that we’ll encounter as we slither down the slope towards normalisation of state-sanctioned deaths.
Market leaders in bumping off those ‘useless eaters’ cluttering up their communities are the Canadians. In Canada about 5% of all deaths are carried out by the state. There, assisted suicide is called MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying).
Initially, MAID was restricted to the terminally ill, those, according to their doctor, with a life expectancy of less than six months. However, recent amendments to the regulations have extended MAID to something akin to a human right which it would be discriminatory to restrict just to the terminally ill, opening the doors to a whole host of others, such as the depressed, anxious and poor. There have even been minors who have successfully been accepted for MAID.
The Canadians produce an illuminating report each year on the progress of MAID. The latest report includes data for 2022. In Figure 1 you can see the growth in people opting for medical help in ending their life by province.
Remarkably, in 2022 6.6% of all Quebecois who died did so at the hands of the state. If the current rate of growth continues this figure will have almost doubled by the end of this year to 13%.
Figure 2 shows the uptake of MAID annually since its introduction in 2016 across all of Canada.
The uptake in MAID has consistently increased by just over 30% per year. At this rate in 2024 the number of MAID deaths will reach about 23,000.
The highest year for Covid deaths in Canada was 2022 (interestingly, a year after the 2021 vaccine rollout) when about 19,000 Covid deaths were reported. If the increase in MAID deaths continues to grow at its current rate (and why wouldn’t it?) in 2024 there will be 25% more MAID deaths than the peak year for Covid fatalities.
Canada has a population of around 40 million, about 60% of the U.K.’s population. Translate Canada’s projected 2024 MAID total to the U.K. and an equivalent figure would be about 38,000. These figures suggest that it won’t be that far in the future when we can expect the British state to be ‘helping’ over 100 people to die every day.
In Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and other places where assisted suicide has been introduced, the wedge, while starting off thin has rapidly widened. The U.K. will be no different.
We don’t have to restrict ourselves to looking to other countries to see how thin wedges lever social change. In 2021 there were about 250,000 abortions in the U.K., not far off 30% of the figure for live births.
The 1967 Abortion Act made it lawful to have an abortion up to the 28th week if two registered medical practitioners believed in good faith that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman or harm her physical or mental health or that of any of her family members.
Abortion was sold as a rare thing. It was expected to be the exception not the rule. I make no comment about the morality of abortion but I’m sure the sheer number of abortions carried out now would be a shock to the voters of 1967.
The Abortion Act required two medical practitioners to approve an abortion and it seems likely that any ‘assisted dying’ bill will adopt similar protection, but in reality it’s probable that this safeguard, as with abortion, will rapidly erode away.
The recent WPATH files lifted the lid on the treatment of people seeking gender reassignment treatment. Documents released in the cache exposed the failure of ‘two doctor’ protection. Rather than protect vulnerable people from hasty and invariably irreversible treatments, doctors and other practitioners all too often showed rather more entrepreneurial than medical concern, merrily signing off any consent forms that came their way for a reasonable consideration.
While approval to proceed with assisted suicide may rest on the opinion of two doctors, the critical question is who initiates the request? One of the great ironies of assisted suicide is that people with ‘locked-in-syndrome’ may find themselves in a ‘Catch-22’ situation; they may wish to exercise their right to suicide but their condition precludes them from applying for state sanction. Conversely, people with a mental condition that attracts them towards suicide for spurious reasons (can I recommend Kevin Yuill’s Spiked article on such a case) may, against all advice, succeed in getting the state to kill them.
I predict that in the near future the issue of who initiates the request to end a life will move from the individual to the state. The demographer Paul Morland, appearing on a recent episode of Nick Dixon’s podcast The Current Thing, explained that Japan passed the milestone of 100 million population in the late 1960s. At the time it had five or six workers for each non-earner. In the 2030s its population is predicted to again cross the 100 million population threshold, only this time going in the opposite direction, by which time it will have five or six non-workers for each earner. How can a society so heavily skewed to ‘takers’ rather than ‘givers’ do anything other than ‘cull’ the infirm?
This is the prospect that euthanasia heralds. Eventually, perhaps in our lifetime, will the state decide on your date of death?
During Covid about 95% of all ‘Covid’ fatalities were of people with other conditions sufficiently serious to get a mention on the death certificate. Few deaths were of otherwise fully healthy people. I suspect we all know the statistics that show that the average age of Covid fatalities was the same as the average age for deaths from all causes.
Back in spring 2020, Nobel Prize winner Professor Michael Levitt predicted Covid would ‘pull forward’ about four to six weeks of deaths. Five weeks of deaths constitutes about 10% of a year’s fatalities. His expectation was that there would be a short sharp wave of ‘excess’ deaths inflating mortality data in 2020 before it settled back to its normal level in 2021. Most fatalities would be of people close to death, who in many cases would have died soon with or without Covid. In a normal year, nine people in 1,000 die, they have an average age of about 82 and have multiple health problems. In 2020 one additional person in every 1,000 also died; like the other nine they averaged about 82 and they too had other health issues. Essentially, this is exactly what will happen with assisted dying. The deaths of those nearing the end of their life will be pulled forward, but this time, as a nation, we’ll be cheering, rather than in 2020 when the nation went mad, bankrupting the country to avoid the pulled-forward deaths of exactly the same profile of people that we’re about to condemn.
Now, imagine if another pandemic similar to Covid struck again, 10 years after the introduction of assisted dying, by which time 10% to 15% of all deaths were coming about through euthanasia. Assisted suicide would have been normalised. Rather than issuing essentially passive DNR notices, how much more likely that we’d start actively bumping off the elderly and vulnerable at the earliest sign of illness? How much more likely if relatives weren’t allowed to visit? A perfect example of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil.
Is it hard to imagine a test being introduced to determine whether someone would be ‘better off dead’? Let’s suppose the hospitals are full, it’s determined that the prospects for recovery are slim, off you go! And once introduced, would you be surprised if such a test were retained once the ‘pandemic’ had abated? Given the WHO’s realisation of the fun it can have with a pandemic, the likelihood is that we’ll be seeing many more in future.
I’m not sure where I stand on ‘euthanasia’. I’m not sure where I stand on capital punishment or abortion either; there seem to be highly persuasive arguments on both sides. My only strong views on any of these issues is on who should make the decision to adopt the principle of having the state kill and I think that should be the people rather than Parliament. I’m perfectly happy for the Government to make decisions on road speeds, pensions, the funding of the armed forces and a whole host of issues, but I do think that if, as a nation, we take it into our heads to kill our own people, then we should all be party to that decision. What’s more, should we vote in favour of euthanasia then any extension, such as the state taking control of when to exercise the coup de grace, should also be subject to a further referendum.
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