The time has come to admit it. I’ve changed my mind about assisted dying.
As a priest, the presumption is generally made that I’m against it for religious reasons. Recent aggressive campaigning by those in favour of allowing doctors to help people to end their lives has been relentlessly dismissive of religious reasons for being against it. As though religious people have no consciences worth respecting, no bodies of their own, no pain and no right to be heard.
The truth is, though I am very obviously religious, I do not have any religious reasons for objecting to the proposed law in principle but the longer that I’ve spent time with those who are actually dying the more I find myself unable to support a change in the law. My concerns are not religious but practical.
For a long time I was fairly uncommitted in this debate. My tendency would be to think that the alleviation of pain was the ultimate goal for anyone at the end of life and to take the view that preventing pain might well be a justification for allowing someone to end their life early.
More recently though experience has suggested to me that the question is a good deal more complicated than that. And so I find that I’ve changed my mind. From being moderately supportive of a change in the law, I now find myself fully opposed to the new legislation.
I remember the day when I changed my mind very well too. I had been called to the deathbed of someone whom I did not know. Before I could get into the room with the dying person, their family met me in the corridor. They asked me whether I could help them as things were very difficult.
“We were just wondering whether you could ask the doctors to speed things up a bit.”
I replied that I couldn’t as the law wouldn’t allow such a thing. And I asked why. What was it? Did they need me to help them to speak to the doctors about trying to get some better pain regulation?
“No” came the answer, “No – the thing is we’ve a skiing holiday booked and we leave on Monday – we just need this to be over so we can get away”.
That was the moment that I realised that not everyone dies with people close to them who have their best interests at heart.
Those who are dying are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. They are losing their power to make independent choices. They are vulnerable to the attitudes of everyone they encounter. And almost everyone whom they encounter may have a financial or other interest not only in their death but in its timing.
Spending time with the dying, I’ve also realised that those at the end of life are particularly vulnerable to societal assumptions about being a burden and causing a fuss.
Increasingly, funeral directors are making good money from ghoulishly promoting Direct Cremations – the disposing of bodies without ceremony or the presence of loved ones. To do so, they repeat again and again in their advertising, suggests that it is better to face death without causing a fuss.
Yet everyone who grieves knows that death in itself is disruptive. Death and grief change lives. They are not to be dismissed. No amount of trying not to cause a fuss changes that.
It has all made me realise that when I die, I want everyone to know that I want plenty of fuss. Fuss is how we show one another that we love them.
The desire to cause others no fuss at all though is one of the greatest pressures that the dying feel.
If it were the case that all people had access to the finest palliative care at the end of their lives and were all surrounded by those who had their best interests at heart in institutions where there is no financial pressure on managers and medics then I might be able to get to a position where I might support the assisted dying proposals.
However, we don’t live or die in that world. And until then, the best way to assist people to die is by investing in those studying pain management, better funding hospitals and hospices and by listening to the stories of those who sit alongside those who are dying.
I’ve sat in those rooms many times.
All of us should be in the presence of those who love and care for us when we die. Not all of us will be. The law, as it stands, is the best way to protect the interests of all of us when we die. For these reasons, I hope that our parliamentarians have the courage to vote no when the final vote is taken on this bill. It is legislation that would fundamentally change the relationship between the individual and the state.
The principle of alleviating pain is a godly one but the reality is that the devil is in all manner of practical detail.
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