During Covid, Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, told the nation: “Don’t kill your gran!”. He was encouraging social distancing. The line was disingenuous, because it equated not following government guidelines with proactively killing a loved one. But now, our nation’s political leaders are due to debate whether or not, after all, we should kill gran!
The debate has been championed by the broadcaster, Esther Rantzen, who’s told her story of being terminally ill with lung cancer. She says she envies her dog’s death: “We give our pets a pain-free, dignified, private death but we cannot offer it to the people we love”. Actually, we can offer a pain-free, dignified, private death; and we already do! What we can’t offer is permission to kill them. The sad thing in Esther Rantzen’s argument is that rather than dignifying the dying, she’s actually dragging human life down to the level of dogs.
When it comes to putting our pets out of their misery, we use euphemisms, like “putting down”, or “putting to sleep”. That’s understandable; we want to blunt the starkness of the act. But when we’re discussing legislation, euphemism does not help us. We need to speak clearly and accurately. And the accurate description of what’s being discussed is “killing” people. One pro-euthanasia slogan says: “people should have choice about how they die”. But that makes it sound like we’re discussing whether to die at home or in a hospital. That’s not the discussion. It’s whether Britain wants to be a place where we’re OK with people committing suicide – either by doctors poisoning the terminally ill or giving them the drugs to do it themselves. No one is discussing whether or not to “give someone a dignified death”. Everyone wants that. We’re discussing whether it’s OK for us to help granny kill herself.
“Don’t worry!”, we’re told. “There’ll be lots of safeguards in place!”. “We will only help granny kill herself when she’s been diagnosed with a terminal illness”. “We will only kill granny when doctors are confident she is conscious, consenting, and in her right-mind”. “Granny will never be forced to kill herself”.
But the implications of legalising euthanasia are huge. It shifts mindsets in very big ways. This opens up a whole line of thought for the vulnerable that is ugly, and reprehensible. Nothing needs to be said; the simple availability of suicide exerts incalculable pressure on the vulnerable and needy. The common feelings – “I’m a burden” or “I don’t want you to be saddled with me” – morph into a polite, “please kill me”.
I’m not yet old, so I haven’t personally experienced the undignified aspects of ageing. But I’ve visited enough elderly people and dying people to see how humiliating the process can be. Our mortal bodies can embarrass us and frustrate us, with their smells and leaks and spills. I’ve seen the toll that caring for someone can take on a family. Death is hard. The ability of modern medicine to unnecessarily prolong and extend life can be questioned. That the medical profession needs to help us face death rather than flee from it is true. But we must not confuse prolonging life with taking life. Stopping treatment is fundamentally different to taking life. It is precisely at this point that loving the weak and dying is so important. The great care that nurses, doctors, and loved ones can give to patients is beautiful. Dressing up killing as “care”, and “kindly killing” granny might seem plausible when a loved one is in distress, but it is unmistakeably cheapening human life. We are judging: “this particular life is no longer worth it”. That is a chilling conclusion to draw.
In contrast, Jesus Christ, and the Scriptures teach every human life is created in the image of God. However much distress they may be in, however worthless they may feel themselves to be, the terminally ill have a dignity, that’s not true of chimpanzees, or house pets. What happens legally in our country isn’t ultimately in our hands. But Stanley Hauerwas’ words are helpful: “I say that in a hundred years, if Christians are identified as people who do not kill their children or the elderly, we will have done well”. In the past, Christians have given our world a vision of the dying that sees them as so much more dignified than dogs. Perhaps we are watching that vision slip away, but we must ourselves keep it ever clearly before our eyes.
