Britain Takes First Step Down a Deadly Path with Legalization of Assisted Suicide
On Friday, millions around the world watched on in horror as Britain’s Parliament took historic steps to legalize assisted suicide. Hailed as a carefully tailored law that would prevent abuses common in other countries with euthanasia regimes, the bill passed with a majority comprised of an odd composition that did not fall along the typical Left-Right axis.
While the bill still requires further committee examination and additional votes before final passage, the symbolism of assisted suicide successfully etching its claws into English law should have those of us in the United States on alert for the movement’s continued efforts on our shores.
Critics opposed the bill on the typical grounds that assisted suicide re-imagines how nations conceive of aging and suffering. It is not simply each instance of assisted suicide that matters, but the aggregate effect on the public imagination that views the legal taking of one’s own life as a permissible response to suffering. Critics have the data on their side, too. As every nation demonstrates that passes assisted suicide, the eligibility criteria to access it only expands—and never contracts—over time, leading to a suicide crisis in Canada. Supporters of the bill argue that the UK bill is more tightly regulated and limited only to persons given a six-month window of life due to a terminal illness. Many problems still exist, considering that people routinely live longer than the six-month window doctors predict.
What happened on Friday in England will likely not stay contained to England. Southern Baptists must be vigilant in opposing any reach of assisted suicide efforts in the United States, where it is currently legal in ten states (all progressive jurisdictions, to note). Let us be clear, however, that assisted suicide is merely the logical end-point to a global abortion culture. If we permit the taking of innocent life at its pre-born stage, we eliminate any limiting principle that prevents life from being taken at an advanced stage.
Increased secularism is synonymous with the growing acceptance of assisted suicide. To view oneself as the sole autonomous agent that can end life is only intelligible within a culture where totalized self-possession and the loss of transcendence dominate. Indeed, the expansion of state-sponsored suicide is inexplicable apart from repaganizing sentiments. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity.
As Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule warned critics of assisted suicide that opposing euthanasia, it is insufficient to argue against assisted suicide on liberal assumptions based solely on pragmatic and procedural concerns: “If the experience of American social conservatives suggests anything,” Vermeule writes, “it suggests that the appeal of consent-based moral frameworks cannot be opposed solely by pragmatic arguments, but only by a more robust metaphysics, which in this case would insist that our lives are not and never were our own to dispose of as we please, even by the most deliberate and well-considered choice.” The greatest conceit of liberal democracy is the idea that maximized autonomy or “liberty” is the highest good of statecraft.
But there is opportunity, too. Evaluating euthanasia biblically requires us to affirm the theological principle of God’s sovereignty over life. It also calls us to affirm the moral principle of never taking innocent life, including one’s own. First, we must remember and proclaim that God is the author of life (Gen. 1:26-27; Acts 3:15). Whether in life or death, we are the Lord’s (Rom. 14:7-9). Thus, from start to finish, God apportions the time of our conception and the time of our death.
Second, God hates murder. God explicitly condemns it in Exodus 20:13. A bedrock moral principle of Christian thought is the good of life and the necessary protections to safeguard it. Legitimate forms of taking life occur only in instances of capital crimes (Gen. 9:5-6), not whether one is infirm or not. It is no less murder when persons murder themselves, assisted or not.
Third, suffering is not unredeemable in the Christian story (2 Cor. 4:17). I have never heard a Christian suffer who has testified to pointlessness in their suffering. In a way we cannot comprehend, suffering draws us nearer to our Lord, a Lord acquainted with suffering himself (Isa. 53:3).
We cannot bite off the promise of medicalized suicide without the bitter pills of cultural catastrophe following. Though I am uncertain as to the religious commitments of Robert Jenrick MP, his rationale for opposing the bill on the floor of Parliament was profound:
“There will be imperceptible changes in behaviours. There will be the grandmother who worries about her grandchildrens’ inheritance if she does not end her life. There will be the widow who relies on the kindness of strangers, who worries; it preys on her conscience. There will be people who are (and we all know them in our lives) shy, who have low self-esteem, who have demons within them. I know those people. I can see them in my mind’s eye. They are often poor, they are vulnerable, they are the weakest in society. And they look to us. They look to parliament to represent them, to support them, to protect them. In their interests, I am going to be voting against this bill today.”
Aside from doctors using the power to heal for the power to kill, the most understated and dangerous principle of assisted suicide is how it fundamentally changes the relationship between the state and the human being. If the continuation of life is no longer a basic moral good deserving of presumptive legal protection, and the state can, in fact, benefit from a person’s death no longer burdening the health care system, this will introduce a principle of dispensability where the state safeguarding life gives way to a perverse incentive structure to end life. When culture mediates life apart from God and transposes divine-like authority onto an omnicompetent state, what you get is a form of faux-compassion.
Thus, this vote reveals the inevitable end of secular “compassion” shorn of Jesus Christ and Christian ethics—death-inducing barbiturates administered with a devilish grin.
Ideas have consequences. And bad ideas inflict collateral on the dignity of human beings, especially the most vulnerable. Thankfully, this is not an arena where Southern Baptists are behind the curve. According to my research, the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention has spoken out against assisted suicide at least four times in resolutions. We must continue to speak out against assisted suicide and give it no quarter.
As an ethics professor, I have two exhortations.
First, I care not only about Southern Baptists opposing assisted suicide but how we oppose it, too. In its endorsement of the bill, The Economist noted that England is “secular” (despite having a feckless regime chaplaincy called the “Church of England” doing the state’s bidding), and therefore, religious arguments against euthanasia no longer hold traction over the population as they may once have. This is an interesting bait-and-switch to frame the debate, considering that opposition to assisted suicide need not be a religious argument at all. It is simply this: We do not kill innocent human beings. When we cross that precious line, we set ourselves on a calamitous path. That moral principle may ultimately derive from a religious principle, but its intelligibility as a moral principle does not require that one be religious to accept it. What we see in The Economist is evidence that secularism is so shallow that it must exclude rational arguments by framing its competitors as exclusively religious. If you want ideological brittleness, rigidity, insularity, and fundamentalism, just look at secularism.
Second is my appeal to my Southern Baptist pastors: We cannot safely assume that just because Southern Baptists are pro-life, that will translate to opposition to euthanasia. Based on my experience, even pro-life individuals are sympathetic to the argument that terminally ill individuals should have autonomy in their decision to “peacefully” end their life. As this issue will not be going away soon, churches and pastors must continue to speak to this issue to get ahead of where the culture of death is taking us.
This article originally appeared at the Center for Baptist Leadership on December 2, 2024.
