Assisted suicide backed: A dark day for the vulnerable

Just moments ago, MPs voted 314 to 291 in favour of the assisted suicide bill. Lives will be needlessly lost as a result.

Despite the many flaws with the legislation, intense criticism of the process and the fervent prayers of God’s people, state-sanctioned suicide will become a reality from 2029 onwards.

It is a desperately dark outcome. Around the world in countries where assisted suicide has already been legalised, you see the same two, twisted trends develop: the numbers of those choosing an assisted suicide increase year on year as the practice becomes normalised, and the criteria for eligibility is always extended. As a result of the vote today, and provided the House of Lords does not block it, England and Wales are about to experience a deadly, social experiment.

I do not think we will have to wait long before there are calls in Parliament to expand the criteria of who can ask for an assisted suicide. In the future, people who are ‘tired of life’ and, if we follow the dreadful example of Belgium and the Netherlands, even sick children as well could be offered assisted suicide.  

Coming the same week as MPs voted for abortion to be decriminalised to birth if the woman self-administers her own abortion, it is clear evidence that we are truly living in a post-Christian culture. Christianity might still be ‘in the air we breathe’, but that air is becoming more and more polluted.

What is especially sickening is that this outcome was dressed up in the language of ‘compassion’ and ‘kindness’. We’ve been told this law will help ‘alleviate suffering’. But what this law will really do is place a burden on some of the most vulnerable in our society. It is the sick, the frail, the elderly, those living with disabilities and the terminally ill who now face the chilling prospect that their doctor might raise assisted suicide with them, even if it is not something they ever want.

Impact on healthcare

This assisted suicide law will fundamentally alter the very nature of healthcare. The state is being empowered to help you kill yourself if you meet certain, broad criteria. Shockingly, MPs even rejected an amendment that would have made it explicit that a person is not eligible for assisted suicide if substantially motivated by feeling a burden, a disability or depression. To make this possible, the constitution of the NHS must now be rewritten to facilitate the implementation of the bill. Even hospices will not be exempt from having to offer assisted suicide. Education campaigns will be run to ‘raise awareness’. Laws send signals. And this law signals to the weakest among us that their lives are not as worthy as others.

You must ask yourself: how did it come to this? It is because society has rejected God and His good design. Romans 1v18-32 details a society, under God’s wrath (Rom. 1v18), which exchanges the known truth about Him for a lie. More specifically, the lie that autonomy is the greatest moral virtue.

The subsequent result is moral chaos. It is like the beautiful, ordered world of Genesis 1-2 is de-created when man tries to play God. And in this post-Christian society, good is called evil and evil is called good (Isa. 5v20). 

We now face a choice

As followers of Jesus, we face a choice. We can either turn away from this issue, resigned to its reality, or we can continue to speak out for the vulnerable (Prov. 31v8-9), with truth and grace, arguing and persuading people about the dangers of this law. Above all, we must be heralds of hope, pressing the government to invest properly in palliative care services so they do not diminish because assisted suicide has been approved by MPs.

As a counter-culture witness in our society, we reflect the values of the new creation. Therefore, we must be places where older people, those with disabilities and the frail are loved, honored, and treated with the dignity they possess as image-bearers of God.

When coupled with passionate gospel proclamation, by God’s grace, the church can be a revolutionary force again in our society. Let me finish with this challenge from the theologian Stanley Hauerwas who said, “I say in a hundred years, if Christians are known as a strange group of people who don’t kill their children and don’t kill the elderly, we will have done a great thing.”