At The Best Place?

Over there, regarding the start of life, Daniel Payne writes:

A major pro-life leader is urging the movement to continue to press for protection for the unborn, calling on advocates to demand more pro-life policy even as the Republican party shows signs of wavering.

"We have to do everything we can to make sure that we're communicating the moral position and also the political position," Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said on Jan. 9.

Dannenfelser spoke to EWTN News in Depth anchor Catherine Hadro on President Donald Trump's recent remarks in which the president urged the Republican party to be more "flexible" regarding the taxpayer funding of abortion.

"Now you have to be a little flexible on Hyde," the president said on Jan. 6, referring to the long-standing federal Hyde Amendment, which has broadly prohibited taxpayer funding of abortion for nearly half a century.

Speaking to Hadro, Dannenfelser said bluntly: "There's no flexibility on that."

"Flexibility should be reserved for what you wear tomorrow, what you're going to eat tonight, where you go on vacation," she said. "This is a matter of life and death."

Hadro noted that during his first run for presidency, Trump had outlined a slate of pro-life promises to voters, including the intent to make the Hyde Amendment "permanent law" rather than a legislative provision. Dannenfelser admitted that she engaged with Trump on pro-life issues during his first term alone.

"Once he got into the second term, he thought he was dealing with the life issue by basically saying, 'States only, we're not doing anything else on the federal level'," she said.

"Now we see the consequence of such a position. It means you can't even stand firm on the Hyde Amendment," she argued.

Asked by Hadro whether or not the pro-life movement needs to "face reality" and accept changing political priorities with respect to the Hyde Amendment, Dannenfelser said: "I 100% reject it." "There is no chance that the power has left the pro-life position," she argued.

"We've been here before. We've been here at moments where there was a weakening in the GOP spine, where we have to do everything that we can to make sure that we're communicating the moral position and also the political position," she said.

Dannenfelser argued that the pro-life movement is "at the best place we could possibly be to move forward" and continue advancing pro-life goals. She admitted, however, that the movement is "not safe" in the current Republican party.

"I think communication is key," she said. "We can't hold back in demanding what has been promised and following through."

And over here, regarding the end of life, the New Statesman now publishes Nigel Biggar:

Sometimes, the manner of dying can rend the heart. No one reading Jonathan Dimbleby’s account of his brother’s death from motor neurone disease, or Anthony Horowitz’s description of his mother’s death from pancreatic cancer, can fail to sympathise with their anguish. Or with their frustration that a less distressing way of ending the pain wasn’t available. Still, it’s not enough to feel; we also have to stand back and think. And once we start thinking, the conclusions that Dimbleby and Horowitz draw from their experiences become less persuasive.

Both see the obvious solution as the legalisation of assisted suicide. (I avoid talking of “assisted dying”, because it hides the truth that what’s envisaged is helping someone kill themselves.) Dimbleby is angry at what he considers the unwarranted delay in the passage of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which would legalise assisted suicide for the dying, through the House of Lords. After all, the bill has already received “exhaustive scrutiny” in the Commons and is, he implies, fit to become law.

But that’s not true. On 9 May, shortly after the Commons had finished its clause-by-clause deliberations, the Royal College of Physicians made this statement: “Whilst the bill has undergone a number of changes during the… committee phase, there currently remain deficiencies that would need addressing to achieve adequate protection of patients and professionals.” Four days later, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which was initially refused the opportunity to present evidence, voiced “serious concerns” and declared that “with too many unanswered questions about the safeguarding of people with mental illness, the College has concluded that it cannot support the bill in its current form”.

This external vote of no confidence was reflected inside the Commons, where, during the bill’s passage, confidence in its safeguards against abuse plummeted. Before the final vote, its majority halved and had only 12 MPs changed their votes from Yes to No, the Lords wouldn’t be discussing it at all. Hansard records that some MPs only voted it through on the assumption that the Upper House could somehow sort out what they had failed to. Since then, the reports of three Lords select committees have confirmed doubts by exposing serious deficiencies in the legislation. The Constitution Committee found the Commons’ poor scrutiny of a bill of such consequence “especially concerning”.

Dimbleby also tells us that “the British public… has consistently shown overwhelming support” for the bill. That’s true, but it obscures important qualifications. Many members of the public don’t understand what they’re supporting. In November 2024, a Focaldata poll of more than 5,000 people found that 40 per cent do not fully understand that “assisted dying” means providing lethal drugs to those within six months of death. Almost one in six wrongly thought it included hospice care, and over half thought it included the right to refuse life-prolonging treatment. It also found that 66 per cent want the provision of social and end-of-life care “sorting out” before any thought is given to permitting assisted suicide. The same month, a More in Common poll of more than 2,000 people confirmed that, while a solid majority support “assisted dying”, their support is conditional on the provision of robust safeguards. It also revealed that 74 per cent don’t believe that the NHS is currently fit to provide them.

While it’s understandable that Dimbleby’s vision is dominated by the distressing experience of his brother’s dying, Members of Parliament cannot legislate simply on the basis of individual cases, however harrowing. They must consider the wider and long-term social ramifications of a law and weigh its risks. That’s why parliamentary support for legalising assisted suicide has always been lower than the general public’s. That’s also why Horowitz is wrong. “It’s my death I’m talking about,” he writes, pleading that he should be free to exercise his autonomy. But the law cannot be made just for him or for individuals like him; it has to be made for everybody.

Consequently, when the Leadbeater bill reached the House of Lords last September, noble parliamentarians faced a dilemma. On the one hand, they heard the persistent concern of advocates for the disabled and several royal colleges about the risks of coerced “autonomy” and corrosion of humane social norms that legalisation entails. On the other hand, their compassion was aroused by stories of individuals suffering grievously, whose plight couldn’t be assuaged by palliative care. The bill, urged its champion, the peer Charlie Falconer, would resolve this intolerably cruel situation.

Except that it wouldn’t. By limiting assisted suicide to the terminally ill, the bill excludes those who aren’t dying but are still suffering grievously. So, anyone who supports the bill, genuinely intending that terminal illness should remain a condition of eligibility, accepts that some people, tragically, have to suffer grievously – because the social dangers of wider access are just too great. But if this tragically imperfect situation is supposed to be tolerable, why is the tragically imperfect status quo not so?

Some supporters view terminal illness not as a permanent limitation but as a tactical beachhead for later strategic expansion. Which it would be. Because although the bill’s text doesn’t mention the relief of “unbearable suffering” or respect for “autonomy”, no one reading Hansard can doubt that those are the principles driving some of the legislative intent. So, after the law has approved assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the argument would soon be heard – with appeal to articles 8 (respect for private life) and 14 (that freedoms be applied without discrimination) of the European Convention of Human Rights – “Why the unfair discrimination? If autonomy for the terminally ill, why not also for the chronically ill? And if the physically ill, why not also the mentally distressed? Don’t they suffer unbearably, too?”

Several speakers in the Lords’ second reading asserted the individual’s fundamental right to autonomy as an axiom, turning a deaf ear to warnings of legalisation’s social dangers. If axiomatic autonomy was to dominate the field, the end of its logic would be the right to assisted suicide for all sane, mature adults. Which, if they’re deemed mature enough to elect governments – as Keir Starmer’s No 10 intends – might one day include 16-year-olds. If we were serious about reducing the quantity of human suffering, we wouldn’t be focusing on legalising assisted suicide, which might be accessed by a maximum of 7,500 people annually within a decade. Rather, we’d focus on the universal provision of good palliative care, which more than 100,000 citizens every year need, but don’t get.

Indeed, if parliament were to pass the bill before securing that, it would create a grave inequality of autonomies. For while some – typically more privileged – would have a choice between decent palliative care and assisted suicide, others – typically poorer and less white – would have to choose between grievous suffering and killing themselves. As Gordon Brown has argued, there is no real choice “if the alternative option, the freedom to draw on high-quality end-of-life care, is not available”. That’s why Demos’s 2012 report on the policy, a commission chaired by Falconer himself, stipulated as an essential precondition of legalisation the universal provision of “the best end of life care available”.

So when Dimbleby claims that the proliferation of amendments and the slow passage of the bill through the House of Lords is due to the bad-faith politicking of “a very small but prominent group of peers”, he’s wrong. During the Lord’s second reading, an extraordinary 160 members – from all sides of the House and of all faiths and none – signed up to speak, around two thirds of them voicing doubts. Amendments have since been laid by over 50 peers, far more than the six that Dimbleby pulls out for special mention.

The Leadbeater bill is one of the most socially consequential legislative proposals to come before any parliament. As a private members’ bill not in the government’s election manifesto, peers aren’t bound to pass it. And they are duty-bound not to pass it if they deem it unsafe. As Professor Mark Elliott, former legal adviser to the Lords Constitutional Committee, has written: “Any argument that it would be undemocratic or otherwise constitutionally suspect for the Lords to do anything other than rubber-stamping the bill would be wide of the mark.”