By Philip Wales, Priest Vicar
Occasionally someone recommends a book to me which, if I summon the courage to read it, has an appropriately unsettling effect. You will know the kind of book, one which captures our attention fully. Do Not Go Gentle, by Dr Kathleen Stock, is such a book. It makes the case against the establishment of services to assist others to die.
It would be natural to hesitate before exploring such a profoundly personal issue. Discussions about assisted dying touch us deeply and provoke questions about what it means to be human, about faith, the nature of suffering, the frailty of human life, morality, ethics and human rights. It is a subject which asks questions of us that we might prefer someone else answer for us.
As Dr Stock explains, her book was written while the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was being debated in Parliament. This private member’s Bill, introduced by Kim Leadbeater MP, ran out of parliamentary time before the House of Lords had completed its scrutiny. Had it been passed, it would have created a legal framework within which some adults with a life-limiting illness and six months or less to live could receive assistance to die.
Dr Stock brings considerable wisdom to her examination of this subject. The case she makes is against the legalisation of a state-enabled service which would provide certain groups of people with the choice and the means to end their lives with the help of others. She begins by introducing her readers to two sets of ideas (which she refers to as archetypes). The first is ‘The Freedom Lover’. This is someone who values personal choice above all else. The second is ‘The Merciful Helper’, a compassionate person who wants to ease another’s suffering.
This done, she shows how the two impulses pull in opposite directions, creating a tension that can never be resolved. On the one hand, the desire to ease another’s suffering has to be legislated for by restricting access to an assisted death service to some groups of people. And on the other hand, those who cherish their personal freedom struggle to justify why the freedom to choose an assisted death should belong to one group of adults but not another. By degrees, she undoes the notion that a benign, ideal or perfect assisted death service can operate in the real world. She does this by examining services across Europe and North America, arguing that once such services are established there is a persistent pressure to widen the groups of adults for whom a legalised assisted death becomes available. The effect, she argues, is that the groups of people who were initially protected by being excluded are gradually drawn within the scope of the legislation through a series of foreseeable consequences flowing from the original legislation.
Throughout her book, Kathleen Stock takes pains to examine the issue from a wide variety of perspectives. For example, in addition to the two opposing principles above, she invites us to look more closely at the assumptions we may bring. An able-bodied person, she points out, may project onto a disabled person their assumptions about what makes a life worth living, without ever stopping to think whether those assumptions are correct.
As will have become clear by now, Dr Stock does not draw on Christian beliefs about the sanctity of human life to inform her reasoning. In the book’s introduction, she declares, ‘for the purposes of transparency’, that she was raised as a Roman Catholic and subsequently lapsed. She makes clear that the arguments she marshals are ‘thoroughly secular’. Some may see this as a flaw but I do not.
This book deserves to be read by those who think that the provision of a service which assists others to die, however limited in scope, is necessary. It deserves to be read, too, by those of us, myself included, who believe that all life is sacred and created by God. Wherever we find ourselves, Dr Stock’s exploration makes it more difficult to treat this as an issue which concerns just some people and not others. This matters to us all. Do Not Go Gentle may prompt those who currently support the provision of state-enabled services to pause and reflect. A second private member’s Bill has now been introduced into Parliament. It is due to have its second reading on 11 September.