Health and Disability

I have no absolute religious objection to assisted dying. And as surveysseem to show, nor do most religious people. But I do have a serious anxiety that we hugely underestimate the emotional complexity of giving patients this choice. For what it says to many people who are dying (and because of that, often exhausted and confused) is that it is now within their power to relieve the emotional distress of those who surround them. It presents the dying with the option of giving their loved ones the gift of their simple swift end. And thus it opens up an emotional minefield of second-guessing and lonely choices. Lonely? Yes, because my loved ones are never going to accept the relief of their distress as a good enough reason for me to choose assisted suicide. That would be hugely guilt-inducing. So if I make the decision to end it all because of them, I can never tell them why.

When the moral history of the 21st century comes to be written, I predict we will look back with horror at how the word choice became a sort of cuckoo in the nest, driving out all other values. This week, in an editorial, the BMJ decided that patient choice now trumps the Hippocratic oath. The moral language of the supermarket has become the only moral currency that is accepted. Which is why, for me, assisted dying is the final triumph of market capitalism: we have become consumers in everything, even when it comes to life and death. And as history demonstrates, the losers in this equation are always going to be the most vulnerable.