Seeking legalised killing

Over the past year we’ve witnessed the astonishing resilience of doctors, nurses, paramedics and other healthcare professionals, alongside hospital staff and administrators.

They’ve faced the pressure of responding to a new pandemic, figuring out how to best help patients struggling to breathe and also huge pressure on available beds. I was speaking to someone from the Christian Medical Fellowship recently who was telling me the stories she’d been hearing from the ‘frontline’ of hospitals. It was tough to hear.

Thankfully, as government ministers are so keen to remind us, the end is apparently in sight. Well, let’s hope so and pray so. Thankfully, as I write this, there’s good evidence some of the pressure on doctors and nurses in beginning to ease.

Time to switch on

But if we’re not careful and switched on, we are going to sleepwalk into putting them in an even worse situation. No, not dealing with a pandemic or the logistical challenge of a vaccine role out. Rather, the legal power to kill patients in certain situations.

Throughout 2020, pro-assisted-suicide campaigners have been relentlessly working on MPs to change their minds. Last time the issue was voted on, it was compressively defeated by 330 to 118. Since then, the London-based pressure group called Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society) claim they’ve changed the minds of 90 MPs. They’re gearing up for a law change as soon as they think they can win.

Let’s be totally clear what’s being proposed, because when it comes to Parliament it will be dressed up in euphemistic language and you’ll hear all the right words being applied in all the wrong ways. They’ll talk about ‘dignity’ and ‘compassion’. They’ll say we put sick dogs down, why not humans? They’ll call the current law old fashioned and outdated. They’ll pour scorn on anyone of us who thinks differently.

At the moment they’re calling for a review of the current law. A modest ask, you might think. But really just a smokescreen. It’s politics, that’s all. What they want is legalised killing.

How do Christians respond?

As Christians we need to work out how we’re going to respond. We could respond with facts and evidence from other nations. This is important and has a place. We can talk about helping people to live and not to die. But what we really need to do is learn to tell a better story about death and dying. We need to show people that the Christian position and teaching of God’s radical grace through Jesus is the best possible news.

And we need to pray and, where we can, show our local MPs that we care deeply about the most vulnerable in society. Because they’re the ones who will suffer the most if assisted killing is legalised in England, or Wales, or Scotland.

There are rumours of a significant new government Bill, known as a ‘Christmas Tree Bill’ because it’s broad and can be easily amended. It could provide the perfect vehicle for the pro-assisted suicide lobby to force MPs to vote on the issue. If such a vote happened, I’m not sure which way it would go. So, my final plea is that you pray about this. If you care about the value of life, please pray assisted suicide would not be legalised here.

In the Netherlands, the government wants to legalise euthanasia for terminally-ill children aged between one and 12 years old. In Belgium, the youngest child to be euthanised was just nine years old. Please, let’s pray and act to stop such awful realities happening here.