There’s no dignity to Dignitas

Let’s set the scene first.

Dame Esther Rantzen, some kind of TV personality (sorry, but my ignorance of the genre doesn’t allow me to be more specific), has been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.

She now wants to go to the suicide clinic in Switzerland to end her life. Her relations wish to travel with her to provide moral support, which creates all sorts of problems.

Eight years ago Parliament voted against legalising assisted suicide. That makes aiding and abetting it a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Since sending her nearest and dearest down isn’t the legacy Dame Esther wishes to leave behind, she made an impassioned plea to Parliament, begging it to put the issue to another vote.

As an aside, this fits in with the modern democratic pattern. Any new law catering to fashionable sensibilities gets chiselled in eternally durable stone. Yet a law going against such sensibilities is written on sand, which can be blown away by a gust of emotive righteousness.

Now, if you or I made that plea, we’d at best receive a reply from our local MP, more likely from his secretary, to the effect that he is deeply sympathetic and all that, but there is little he can do about it. With that he’d remain faithfully ours.

But since Dame Esther is a TV personality, she can’t be fobbed off quite so easily. Hence a lively debate ensued, underpinned with words like ‘dying with dignity’, ‘agony’, ‘unbearable pain’, ‘anguish of the whole family’ and so forth.

However, some public figures, including an MP or two, are arguing against another vote on the issue because they object to assisted suicide for any number of reasons.

Lord Sumption thinks that: “the real issue here is not about the merits or demerits of assisted suicide – it’s a question of the power of the state. Does the state have the moral right to intervene in such an intensely personal and agonising issue?”

On balance, he thinks the state has that right, which is why he’d vote for such a law. I’d vote against it, but not for the reason cited by Lord Sumption.

I’m as opposed as the next man to expanding the power of the state, but the issue here is precisely about “the merits and demerits”. If assisted suicide has the demerit of an unlawful taking of a human life, then it falls into the legitimate remit of any state, no matter how hands-off and libertarian.

Other commentators talk about slippery slopes and the thin ends of wedges. Relying on empirical evidence, they sensibly cite the examples of Holland and Belgium, the first countries that legalised euthanasia.

And let me tell you, when it comes to promoting modern perversions, those countries are indeed the lowest of the low. Once euthanasia became legal, Netherlandish doctors began to kill people at an ever-increasing rate.

They bump off demented patients, even though the law says the euthanasia candidate has to be of sound mind. They kill mentally disturbed teenagers and young girls with anorexia. They put to death women grieving for their dead husbands.

All in all, euthanasia accounts for one in every 20 deaths in Holland, and the proportion is steadily going up. It’s hard to avoid the impression that, if euthanasia becomes legal, sooner or later it’ll become compulsory.

Other countries follow suit. For example, in Canada patients are offered death over treatment as a way of cutting medical costs. That show of fiscal prudence, otherwise commendable, here seems ever so slightly inappropriate, but I’m no expert on pecuniary matters.

I’m better at catching the whiffs of modern deviancy, and one of them is a thinly disguised lament that we have too many old people for our own good. More and more people have the audacity to live so long that they deplete state coffers without adding anything to them.

Putting the wrinklies down can thus be seen as a public service, while clinging on to life against all statistical odds begins to look like obtuse, bloody-minded selfishness. That makes assisted suicide a public-spirited act akin to heroic martyrdom. And if some old codger is too slow to appreciate the morality involved, he may be helped to see the light, or rather darkness.

Getting back to Dame Esther, I have personal reasons for sympathising with her plight, if not with her plea. Some 20 years ago, I too was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer considered incurable.

In fact, I still remember a Scottish consultant with a whole alphabet after his name declaring: “Your prognersis is puer”. I mentally translated that diagnosis into English as saying that my prognosis was poor and rendered my soul to God.

Yet here I am, 20 years later, alternately regaling and disgusting you with my vituperative comments on modernity – including the aspect of it that deals with assisted dying. Call it a miracle, call it good luck but, whatever you call it, it happens.

The possibility, however remote, of recovery from cancer and other deadly conditions is an argument against assisted suicide, but it’s not a very strong argument statistically. All other arguments mentioned above are stronger, and I’d add to them the possibility of a misdiagnosis.

Yet what surprises me is that not a single objection to assisted suicide I’ve read in the past few days refers even obliquely to the fact that for many centuries our civilisation regarded suicide as a sin worse than murder. Since that view was based on the formative civilisational premise, one would expect it to get an airing, even if it’s then emphatically dismissed.

In fact, most commentators hasten to establish their atheist credentials first, lest they may be accused of objecting to that practice for uncool reasons. One would think that days before the world will celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, that name should at least come up in the historical context if no other.

Yet for centuries suicides were denied Christian burial, and they couldn’t be interred on consecrated grounds, a privilege not denied to murderers. One reason for that was that a murderer could repent his sin, but a suicide obviously couldn’t.

But there was a philosophical reason too, every bit as valid as the ecclesiastical one. A murderer takes one human life or several, but he doesn’t defy life as such. That’s exactly what a suicide does.

He doesn’t just take a human life, he destroys the very notion of human life. He also commits the worst cardinal sin of pride by claiming total sovereignty over his own life, denying God even minority co-ownership.

A suicide is different not only from a murderer, but also from a martyr. A martyr sacrifices his life for a cause he considers greater than himself. He thereby asserts the proper hierarchy by acknowledging that such causes exist. His is an act of love.

A suicide says by his very act that no cause is greater than himself. He hates all of them; he detests life. His is an act of hate. As the be all, he feels entitled to become the end all – Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden for a lesser display of hubris.

I’m not, God forbid, suggesting that my archaic view of the world should still hold sway over modern sensibilities. I’m just surprised that, so close to Christmas, no debater has made even a passing reference to the Christian implications of assisted suicide.

After all, just seven months ago our king was anointed in the name of Our Lord, promising to uphold his religion. I’d wonder how King Charles feels about assisted suicide, but I’d rather not commit an act of lèse-majesté. I’ll pray for Dame Esther Rantzen instead.