Disabled voices are missing from the UK's 'assisted dying' debate

Ann Farmer

October 21, 2024 12 Reactions

The National Health Service in the UK is under great financial pressure and disabled people are expensive. Where “assisted dying” is legal, the majority of requests involve fears of being a burden. In such places, patients awaiting treatment are now offered the “choice” of death instead. 

It’s hardly a novel idea. Even as far back as the 18th-century philosopher and religious sceptic David Hume argued that suicide might be a duty. He wrote in his tract, “On Suicide”:

If it be no crime, both prudence and courage should engage us to rid ourselves at once of existence, when it becomes a burthen. It is the only way, that we can then be useful to society, by setting an example, which, if imitated, would preserve to every one his chance for happiness in life, and would effectually free him from all danger of misery.

But we do not have to go back that far in history, since we have the 20th-century example of Nazi propaganda for “mercy deaths”. In 1941 Bishop Clemens August Count von Galen, of Münster, gave a famous sermon condemning Action T4. It has lost none of its relevance. The bishop (now a “Blessed” in the Catholic Church) said:

"If you establish and apply the principle that you can kill 'unproductive' fellow human beings then woe betide us all when we become old and frail! If one is allowed to kill the unproductive people then woe betide the invalids who have used up, sacrificed and lost their health and strength in the productive process. If one is allowed forcibly to remove one's unproductive fellow human beings then woe betide loyal soldiers who return to the homeland seriously disabled, as cripples, as invalids. If it is once accepted that people have the right to kill 'unproductive' fellow humans--and even if initially it only affects the poor defenseless mentally ill--then as a matter of principle murder is permitted for all unproductive people, in other words for the incurably sick, the people who have become invalids through labor and war, for us all when we become old, frail and therefore unproductive."

The British obtained a printed copy of the banned sermon, together with other of his sermons criticising the Nazi regime. These were which were read out on the BBC and even air-dropped on German cities as anti-Nazi propaganda.

Those were the days! Eighty years later the BBC is broadcasting propaganda for “mercy deaths”.

How far we have come from traditional Judeo-Christian teaching, to be discussing “assisted dying” as a compassionate solution to suffering! We are effectively agreeing with those advocates of compulsory euthanasia for the “unfit” who believed that death was better than living with a disability – that it was better to be dead than disabled.

Before we turn compassion into cruelty, and cruelty into compassion, we need to discuss what it would mean to legalise death for disability – to replace caring with killing.  

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Ann Farmer writes from the United Kingdom.

Image credit:  photo by Hans Moerman on Unsplash