Beware The Euphemisms Over Assisted Suicide

Sonia Sodha writes:

Suicide is defined quite simply, as the act of killing oneself intentionally. Theresa May was thus quite right when she argued in a House of Lords debate on the assisted dying bill that it is really an assisted suicide bill. This legislation would make it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to people with a terminal illness, and an expected prognosis of six months or less, so that they can take their own lives. It is therefore, by definition, a bill to legalise medically assisted suicide.

Not so, said a small group of campaigners who wrote to her last week accusing her of being “deeply insensitive”, adding that they hoped she would “reflect on your choice of words”. And as the Lords debate continued last Friday, several peers saw fit to similarly chastise colleagues opposing the bill for their use of language.

I understand why campaigners with terminal illnesses want it to be called assisted dying, not assisted suicide. They see their desire to end their lives as something quite separate from suicide driven by anguish or depression: as a choice to end their lives earlier than they would otherwise naturally, because they wish to prevent their own pain and suffering. A rational, considered desire for death, not an irrational or despairing urge.

But in reality there is no such clear line to be drawn. The bill’s tests for whether someone can opt to end their own life after a terminal diagnosis are incredibly weak: simply, do the two doctors signing off the prescription of lethal drugs believe, on the balance of probability, that they have not been coerced or pressured into it; and do they have the capacity to make this decision?

The result is that someone with a terminal diagnosis — which itself can involve significant uncertainty, leaving open the prospect that they might have years of healthy life ahead of them — and who is depressed or panicked at their diagnosis, or who feels despair about the prospect of being a burden, or who is in an undetected coercive relationship with a partner or family member, can be prescribed lethal drugs. Far from protecting the vulnerable, this bill would inevitably result in the state allowing the prescription of lethal drugs in cases where it absolutely ought not to do so. This is why so many medical professionals and safeguarding experts, including the government’s suicide prevention adviser, Professor Louis Appleby, oppose it.

Yet the “assisted dying” euphemism is a powerful one; in wrongly implying the legislation will safely exclude those the state ought not to help to kill themselves, it shores up the idea that to oppose it is unkind and denies the empowered a choice, rather than protecting people from wrongful deaths. It has paved the way for campaigners to take “assisted deaths” out of the checks that exist for other unnatural deaths, including suicide: the scrutiny of coroners. It’s also not the only euphemism on the face of the bill; the prescription of lethal drugs that may in some cases lead to a distressingly uncomfortable death is simply “assistance”, the drugs themselves “approved substances”.

Language has always been an important aspect of social campaigning: it can be seen in the way pro- and anti-abortion rights campaigners respectively refer to themselves as pro-choice and pro-life, for example. What’s new, however, is the attempt to emotionally blackmail people who don’t share your views into using your preferred euphemisms, because accurate language is somehow considered offensive or impolite.

To see how effective these attempts to control other people’s language can be in winning arguments, one need only consider the highly contested debate on gender and sex. Early on, gender identity campaigners were able to quickly enforce a societal norm that it is rude, hateful or bigoted to refer to a man who identifies as female as anything other than a woman. The very term “trans women” wrongly suggests that these men are a subset of the category of women, in the same way that a “tall woman” or an “Indian woman” might be.

This has made it far harder for women to defend their existing legal rights to single-sex spaces; it posits them as nasty individuals who want to exclude a subcategory of women, rather than women who quite rightly think men have no place in women’s changing rooms, sports and rape crisis centres, regardless of how they identify. This is why in the recent legal case about whether it is discriminatory to expect a female nurse to share workplace changing facilities with a male doctor, NHS Fife’s legal team unsuccessfully tried to force the lawyers on the other side to refer to the male doctor as though he were female.

The extent of mainstream linguistic institutional capture on gender is so great that the BBC’s editorial complaints unit has made some extraordinary rulings in the past two years, including that the Today programme presenter Justin Webb broke its impartiality rules when he made the factually accurate clarification that trans women are male, and that it was accurate for the BBC to claim that a male killer who identified as female was a woman, simply because he identified as such, and in doing so distorted its reporting of male violence.

We thus need to be very careful before succumbing to emotionally wrought pleas to use misleading or inaccurate language because it is the “kind” thing to do. Not only is there no moral obligation to do so, it can allow campaigners to distort public discourse in a way that camouflages harmful social consequences.