Why can we never support assisted suicide?

This month, the Westminster Parliament will be prorogued and a King’s Speech should take place after the local elections on 13 May. With the closure of this parliamentary session, the assisted suicide bill in the House of Lords will fall, having run out of time before it completed all its stages.

To my mind, this is an astonishing result, and a worthy reason to praise our glorious God for His grace and mercy.

Assisted suicide bill

When Kim Leadbeater introduced her bill, I was convinced the battle to stop it becoming law would be the most difficult we had ever faced.

It passed not one, but two votes in the House of Commons. Historically, the Lords has been judged to be fairly in favour of assisted suicide as well. But here we are, a few years after the bill started its parliamentary journey and we can say for certain it will not pass this session.

Will it come back?

The obvious next question is this: Will it come back? And the answer to that is a clear yes. We have won a battle, but the wider war over “choice” at the end of life and the best way to care for people with a terminal illness will carry on. Advocates of assisted suicide will lick their wounds, no doubt, but their determination knows no limits.

So how might it come back? Will MPs in favour of assisted suicide use the Parliament Act, which is a little–used piece of legislation that would blunt the Lords’ ability to block the bill? If they do go down this route, it will force the government to get more involved than any sane and sensible government would desire.

My judgement is that they will try for another Private Members' Bill. Someone worked out that based on the number of “spartan” assisted suicide supporting MPs, if they all go in for the Private Members' Bill ballot, there is a 44 per cent chance that one of them will come in the top five of the ballot, which means their bill would have the most parliamentary time in the next session.

How do we respond?

In light of this, we should pray that God will show His sovereign power again and prevent this from happening. For hours and hours of debate time being used on assisted suicide, when palliative care services need urgent attention, is a tragedy!

I recognise that you may be reading this and deep down you wonder if we really should be rejoicing so much over assisted suicide being stopped? Would it really be so bad? And what about those hard, awful cases, where someone has motor–neurone disease, for example, and suffers a very difficult death?

Having engaged on this issue for nearly a decade (and plenty of others have worked on it for longer still!), I am more and more convinced that if we love God’s Word and love our neighbour, we will never support assisted suicide.

At the heart of such an approach to illness and suffering at the end of life is a belief that life can run out of value and meaning based on your circumstances. Yet humanity is made in God’s image. Our dignity is utterly intrinsic and based not on what we can do, but on the simple fact that God made us to know Him.

Therefore, we must submit our times into God’s hands and walk with one another through pain and suffering. This is what true and real compassion looks like. Our message, unlike assisted suicide is this: it is a good thing that you are in this world. And that is true whatever stage of life you are at.

Will assisted suicide come back? Yes! And when it does, we must be prepared to once again argue against it because again, and to put our positive, better story forward: we need more palliative care, available for all who need it at the point of need. That is God’s better story and it is worth fighting for.