Who is to say that you should not be allowed to kill yourself—approved by the government and in all likelihood organised by and paid for by the government—for whatever reason you so desire? After all, isn’t that the logical extension of a “You Do You” culture?

The Death Cultures

UK legislators love death. What else to make of a couple of weeks in which, first, abortion was permitted for any reason up to the point of birth  (“permitted” simply means that what is already happening will no longer be criminalised).

Sex-selection included.

That’s right. The United Kingdom is perfectly happy to take on the biases towards girls—and rest assured the majority of those aborted will be girls—that has plagued some of their migrant populations over the past decades, and that has, across swathes of South East Asia and the Middle East, resulted in less women in many populations. Pagan Rome is back with a vengeance.

And then there is the latest—though not fully through the UK Parliament—push to end life for the terminally ill. Well I say the “terminally” ill at this point, because as we know it never ends there. It’s astonishing that the UK legislation promises to fully fund this state-sanctioned suicide. If only it could be so generous with its palliative care in its failing NHS, as noted by the Anglican Bishop of London, Dame Sarah Mullally who states about the legalisation:

“It does not prevent terminally ill people who perceive themselves to be a burden to their families and friends from choosing assisted dying. And it would mean that we became a society where the state fully funds a service for terminally ill people to end their own lives but, shockingly, only funds around one third of palliative care.”

Elder abuse is bad enough. And now this. We have an ageing population, a health funding shortage, a housing shortage, and an aged-care facility shortage. Come on gran, do what is right by the family and the state!

We can only imagine where this ends up. Actually we don’t have to only imagine. We know where it ends up. Just last year in the Netherlands a 29 year old woman who had suffered mental illness ended her life with state approval. And that process began when she was 25.

Think about that. A woman a year older than my daughter went down the path of killing herself and her government—which most likely spends billions on mental health care—permitted it.  Deep irony there.  So let’s not pretend—and let’s call out contra the deniers—that this is not where it will end for the UK. Every time such legislation is proposed anywhere, the scorners come out and deny that it means anything other than hastening what was about to happen. Utter tosh. Call out the hypocrisy.

Slippery Slopes and Watersheds

But back to the UK. The pincer move of “start of life” and “end of life” is not about slippery slopes. I hope we know that. It’s about watersheds—boundary markers.

You see, a slippery slope argument says that once one decision is made about end of life or abortion, then the creeping legislation that follows becomes more contentious and extreme. But it is like a Chinese fingertrap. You don’t go backwards, only forwards. You slide only in one direction.

Yet while “slippery slope” is the partial truth, it’s the watershed argument that counts. You know what I mean by “watershed” in this instance don’t you? In geography a watershed is that area into which water drains from a high point of ground, typically a mountain range or hill.

If rainfall land on one side of the hill it can end up in a watershed a long way away from rainfall that lands close to it, but on the other side of the hill. Two equal and opposing directions. It’s all very binary.

What is the watershed in the UK—and indeed across the West—at the moment. It’s this: There are two opposing views of what it means to be human, and therefore what it means to flourish as a human. Or as I have put it elsewhere: “What a human is, What a human is for, and, Who a human is for?”

The secular understanding of this has come adrift from the historically Christian understanding of this—an understanding that held life—all life—was sanctified by virtue of each life being made in the image of God.

Such a view is no longer the case. It’s no longer the air we breathe even. Which is why we have moved so much on these issues. I well remember the days in primary school being told that a baby is just a clump of cells that can be “scraped” out of a womb (yep we got told that back in the 1970s).

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