Death

We keep being warned that the Assisted Dying Bill is a Slippery Slope. Allow physcians to prescribe suicide pills to terminally ill adults who request them, and before you know it, Kier Starmer will be telling everyone over the age of 29 to report to the Termination Center.

And it is in fact true that most social reforms happen incrementally. We abolished hanging for crimes other than murder in 1823; we abolished it for the majority of murders in 1954; and stopped killing criminals altogether in 1965. We decrimalised (fine word) homosexuality in 1967, but equal marriage didn't arrive until 2014. We banned corporal punishment in schools in 1983; Scotland and Wales banned all forms of smacking in 2020 and 2023, and its only a matter of time before England follows suit. 

So, in fact, yes: if we let doctors prescribe suicide pills to terminally ill people who positively want to end their lives, there is a distinct possibility that in a few years time Esther Rantzem or someone will say "Why aren't we prepared to do the same favour for people who are very old, people who are horribly disabled, people with incurable chronic clinical depression, people who have irrevocably besmirched their honour, people whose one true love has rejected them, people who don't much fancy the prospect of spending the next thirty years in jail, or for that matter people who just happen to be having a really bad morning."

And if you thank that outcome is undesirable, then surely it is better to not take the first step in the wrong direction?

I am very sorry for the twelve year old kids being sent to Tyburn for petty theft, but if we stop hanging children who steal pocket handkerchieves then in a couple of centuries we will probably stop hanging nurses who murder babies.

It's a slippery slope. Innit.

But why do we so rarely hear the converse argument -- what I suppose we could call the Rough Incline argument? The logic of those who are opposed to asssist dying in principle -- because longevity is to be pursued at all costs, because suffering may have value, because all killing is wrong, because life has a quality called "sanctity" -- would surely require you to say that suicide, with or without the assistance of a medical professional, is wrong under all circumstances. Rejecting the Assisted Dying Bill is a Rough Incline that leads inexorably to the repeal of the 1961 Suicide Act. Remember Charlie Chaplain's Limelight (1952) where the washed up comedian finds the ballet dancer with her head in the gas oven, and has to keep it secret because, as the doctor says "Attempted suicide means jail."

Which, I assume, is what some Roman Catholics clergy, at least, do actually want; and which would, as a matter of fact, be a relatively self-consistent position. It is very odd to have a law which says "It a serious criminal offence to help someone, or indeed to fail to prevent someone, from doing a thing which it is perfectly legal for them to do by themselves."

Granted that suicide is no crime, why do we need all these safeguards and doctors and committees? Won't there be something a little ghoulish about the spectacle of a late-stage cancer patient arguing before a judge that he's really does want to cash in his chips and at time and place of his choosing? Wouldn't it have been perfectly logical in 1962 to have fully legalised suicide and made suitable tablets available in chemist shops for anyone who chose to purchase them? Or, failing that, provide walk-in suicide clinics for people who wanted to avail themselves of their services? 

Certainly, a lethal tablet is a dangerous thing to have in your possession -- you could take it accidentally, or use it to kill someone non-consensually -- but that's equally true of a knife or a can of rat-poison. Slipping a suicide pill in granny's gin without asking her first would be murder, and murder is already frowned on by the law. We don't generally ban a thing because there's a chance it could be misused.

And doubtless, the free availability of death drugs on demand would be rolled out in conjunction with lots of help and advise and psychological treatment for people in desperate situations who aren't ready to end it all; in the same way that when we legalise heroin drugs, we'll put lots of resources into medical and psychological assistance for people who want to come off it or not get on it in the first place.

But rather than howling that the state is going to start killing people, couldn't we reasonably ask what possible business of the state's it is to try to stop people from killing themselves if that is what they really want? 

Some of the people who are horrified by the assisted dying bill think that requiring manufactures to label product (so consumers know how much sugar and salt their cheeseburger contains) is an unacceptable intervention by what they call the nanny state. They throw up their hands in horror when Kier Starmer suggests that it should be illegal to smoke cigarettes in pub gardens, and indeed that tobacco might eventually become a prohibited substance. 

Why should nanny require a permission slip from two doctors and a judge before she allows you to do something which is not illegal in the first place?

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