The Big Picture

Graeme Archer writes:

Always beware those arguments that rely upon asking you to see “the bigger picture”, especially on an issue that’s emotionally fraught.

It’s not just a way of getting you to set your own interests aside. It’s a way to wish away the awkward details – which, in the end, are all that really matter.

So it is with the proposed new laws on assisted suicide.

The “big picture” here is that currently, some human beings are being left to suffer long, painful deaths. Some would prefer to stop living – and would gladly do so, were euthanasia legalised. So in order to ease their suffering, the law has to be changed.

Lord Falconer’s Bill to that end – which will come before Parliament in the next few months, with a free vote promised by the Government – is clearly well-intentioned.

It comes with many safeguards. Two physicians would first declare that a patient has fewer than six months to live.

Such patients would be furnished with a lethal dose of some drug – an opiate, I expect – and could be helped with the act of its administration (a very bureaucratic word, that, which should itself make us pause). 

Crucially, those involved with this “administration” would not be held criminally responsible. They would not be investigated, charged or prosecuted.

“Slippery slope” is a toe-curling cliché, but it’s not always wrongly applied. The similarity with the medical checks instigated by the 1967 Abortion Act is striking.

Fifty years is all it took to move from that same carefully sanctioned process – in which two similar physicians would have to agree that the continuance of the mother’s pregnancy would pose a grave risk to her physical and mental health, or that of her children – to one in which calls for removing doctoral approval altogether are now commonplace.

Note also the proposal that euthanasia may be legally introduced only for those people with six months to live; people who will die quite soon.

But we are all limited in time; this six-month hurdle feels entirely arbitrary. Some of the patients whose lives most break our hearts are those condemned to very much longer existences. This legislation would not help them.

Which means that if the Bill were passed, we would only be at the start of our experiment with euthanasia. 

Lawsuit would follow campaign would follow Private Member’s Bill, until safeguard after safeguard was removed. Be careful what you wish for.

Now, I have no religious “big picture” to instruct me that self-destruction is a universal sin, but the religious have a point about the necessity of such a picture, or map; we need one to navigate the ethical ocean in which we swim.

As it happens, I quite like the Christian map – I just can’t buy into its cartographer – and since the law is based on it, I’m fine that it puts “life” as north and “death” as south, and declares: head north.

Yet all maps have their limits of scale.

In the smallest of pictures, the most intimate settings, they can never describe in sufficient detail the reality of the physical world they attempt to capture.

In such places, we have no big pictures to guide us, no external rules – nothing but ourselves, each other, our love.

One such place is inside the room where patient X is helped to die by his loved one; call her Y.

Of course, since I’m currently blessed with health, I don’t know what I would do if I found myself in such a situation. But I think I would seek release. Let’s not mince words: I think I would want to die.

And, of course, I would not like my loved one to suffer the legal consequences, were he to help me achieve that outcome. Real people in this situation exist: it is inhuman not to want to help them.

But what about other Xs, other Ys? It is not unreasonable, in a country where the scandal of elderly “care” seeps into our consciousness like a weeping wound, to suggest that lots of Xs may wind up dead at the hands of Ys who found themselves succumbing to the lure of selfishness.

I don’t believe the double-physician lock would save every X from undesired extinction, not after (say) 50 years had passed.

Mercy killings have always happened – they always will. And the person who dies asks a lot of his killer, on whose mercy he throws himself.

But he asks it of the rest of us, too: he also asks his killer to place herself at our mercy. She must ask for our pity and our love.

We either accept that duty of judgment, or turn a blind eye, and outsource our concern to legislation.

We must trust, in other words, in our ability to tell the difference between mercy and self-serving callousness - in the case of Y helping X to die, and in cases of Regina vs Y, too.

I don't think so little of us that, even without Lord Falconer's Bill, we should not expect such mercy to be there, in abundance.