The widespread adoption of abortion in the past sixty years has changed us, it’s been a notable feature in the triumph of personal autonomy as the highest good and has changed our understanding of sex in very significant ways. I anticipate similar shifts stemming from assisted suicide and the moral philosophy that underpins it over the next sixty years. Churches must resist this. 

As I write the UK Parliament has voted ‘yay’ to the second reading of a bill to legalise assisted suicide. It’s been wildly reported internationally as being legalised, which is a slight misunderstanding of the system as another vote is required, but it seems likely it will continue to pass.

Assuming it does, this is perhaps the biggest cultural shift since the Abortion Act of 1967. At the same time it seems entirely inevitable, one will naturally lead to the other. What I mean by that is that as we embrace a willingness, as a society rather than as individuals, to kill the most vulnerable, it’s not wholly surprising that eventually we become willing to kill other vulnerable groups. We have long embraced a culture of death.

It is something to be mourned and wailed at. If you shrug your shoulders at it and move on I can only suggest that there is something wrong with your moral tastebuds; this is abhorrent. That we would take vulnerable people and, rather than giving them what dignity is possible in death would allow them to end themselves (with assistance) is vile. It’s vile before we look at how open the particular version we’ve had proposed is to abuse or what’s happened in Canada.

Why is it vile? Because we don’t have a right to kill ourselves and because life is precious. We find that difficult to hear, but we don’t belong to ourselves. Of course we naturally go to those in unimaginable pain and want to lessen that pain, that’s a good impulse. Encouraging them to kill themselves isn’t lessening their pain, and it changes all of us. That the health service now might offer to kill us is a significant shift, but that we live in a world where that’s normalised also dehumanises every one of us.

On top of that we know that its inevitable that people kill themselves because they don’t want to be burdens, which is exactly what we’re supposed to be. We also know that’s its inevitably going to be cheaper for the NHS to offer assisted suicide to certain very sick patients than to treat their condition. I suspect it will take a long time before anyone is truly that callous, but the line on the budget starts to ask a question of those who make those decisions and the mere possibility of it will start to grow calluses on the soul. It will take incredible moral courage to resist this, and I do not think we have that as a society.

What does this mean for the church?

There are two things, the first is important and the second is vital.

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