This Is How It Happens

Peter Hitchens writes:

Why is it that so many in our liberal elite are so keen to make it so easy for the old and ill to die?

The BBC, the liberals’ Vatican, misses no chance to broadcast harrowing cases of people in dreadful pain who wish to leave their lives.

The topic seems to be debated in Parliament every few weeks. There is a plan to usher in legalised self-destruction through a Private Members’ Bill in the Commons. And any development in Switzerland is given great publicity, such as the new death device used there for the first time last week.

Yet, rather oddly, you need to search to see much coverage of the country that has chosen to take this road most boldly. In Canada, death has become a human right. Medically assisted departures now account for one death in 25 in that country. Critics fear that it will, in time, lead to the deaths of many disabled and poor people who choose to end their lives in this way.

I do not know if they are right. But such fears are often justified. The opponents of freely available abortion, back in the 1960s, predicted that it would lead to abortion on demand on a huge scale. And they were undeniably correct.

Easily available contraception, mass sex education and the ‘morning after pill’ didn’t exist when abortion was liberated in 1967. Yet the number of abortions still rises each year. In 2022, the total for England and Wales was 251,377, the highest ever.

The supporters of free abortion once used to say that the procedure should be ‘safe, legal and rare’. Now, they are dropping the word ‘rare’. Could the same thing happen to assisted death?

Like most people, I can see that there are cases so distressing that it is reasonable for the law to look the other way or stretch a point if someone helps a fellow-creature to die. This was pretty much also the case with abortion before 1967. In 1962, for instance, there were 2,800 legal ‘therapeutic’ abortions in NHS hospitals in Britain, and thousands more in private clinics.

But the law was still rightly free to intervene if it thought it necessary. Once that limit is gone, what was urged as an act of mercy can all too easily become a cheapening of human life.

This is just about the last warning you will get, if the Starmer government has its way and assisted dying is slipped through one Friday afternoon when the country is half asleep. ‘How did that happen?’, you will wonder. This is how it happens.