Pressure mounts for fresh vote on assisted suicide
Nicola Laver
Assisted suicide could be legalised in England and Wales within months, after reports that Downing Street would not obstruct a Private Member’s bill to introduce legislation. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has previously supported a law change and promised a free vote.
A so-called ‘citizen’s jury’ recently backed the legalising of assisted dying for the terminally ill.
Hospices warn on assisted dying
Nicola Laver
Hospices in the UK are warning of severe underfunding, leading to fears that if ‘assisted dying’ is legalised, it would lead to more terminally ill patients requesting it.
In July, a Private Member’s bill on assisted dying was introduced in the Lords, and CARE has warned that a ‘right to die’ would become a ‘duty to die’. The bill was introduced by Lord Falconer, who has been campaigning for legalising assisted dying for more than a decade.
politics & policy
Assisted suicide: a clash of two worldviews
James Mildred
In a column for The Times, commentator Matthew Parris said that legalising assisted suicide would put pressure on older people and those with a terminal illness to end their lives. In his view, this is a good thing.
In a similar article for the The Spectator, he said that legalising assisted suicide was simply the outworking of Darwinian social thought. Our moral codes, he argued, are driven by the Darwinian notion of the fight for survival, whether we accept this or not.
Assisted suicide? Justin Welby? It’s all about God
There have been two questions I’ve been asked more than any others in the last few weeks. First, what do you think about assisted suicide? And second, what do you think about Justin Welby? There’s plenty that could be said in answer to both. But at heart, the answer I want to give is the same: It’s all about God.
Of course we want to talk about the ethics of medicine, the sanctity of life, the devaluing of the weak, the protection of the vulnerable, the application of justice to the wicked, the goodness of marriage, the sinfulness of sexual immorality, and many more things beside. But they are, in a sense, derivative; for all of God’s laws flow from God Himself. When terrible ethical failures happen, it is because there is first a failure to know and love the one true God.