Now that the United Kingdom has voted to introduce assisted suicide into law, there can be no doubt that where the UK has gone, Ireland will follow. Across the Irish Sea there was at least a serious, public debate with strong voices on both sides arguing the issues. In Ireland, we could only wish for such a public space.
Once the principle that the state should not take the life of its citizens is broken, the dyke has been breached. There will be no turning back no matter what anyone argues about safeguards or tightly constructed legislation.
The Joint Oireachtas Committee on assisted dying in Ireland heard all the arguments. It heard from the different constituencies – Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, Oregon and others – where safeguards proved – and continue to prove – to be useless as activists, legislators and courts, strip away at inherent dignity of life of more and more people.
Ironically, progressives who argue in every other walk of life that individuals need the protection of the law from social pressures that impinge their agency, turn into the purest of libertarians when it comes to life issues – at both ends of the cycle.
They argue the right to choose and care not a fig – and actively deny the possibility – that vulnerable people will be pressured into considering ending their own lives once the law allows, and thereby encourages.
In Canada, the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law does not directly allow poverty as a reason to seek death but a recent coroner’s report from Ontario revealed that roughly half of the people euthanised are from socially or economically disadvantaged backgrounds, with homelessness, housing insecurity, inability to get the right medical care, trouble managing a disability, being significant contributors to people seeking a premature death.
Once the principle is breached that the State – and doctors – can be deployed to take human life, rather than the previously conceived natural roles, respectively, to enhance citizens lives and to protect health, there is no longer any clear ethical line that can be drawn.
Arbitrary lines in the sand may be drawn – six months to live, unmanageable suffering, incurable illnesses – all of these are subjective but arbitrary. What is so special about six months? We are learning from the abortion debate in Ireland that there are no real safeguards. 12 weeks or 24 weeks are arbitrary. The only partially objective line is either conception or viability but these do not come into discussions as the unborn child is not considered a life with rights unless it is wanted.
Assisted dying, assisted suicide, euthanasia – they are all the same once the window dressing is removed – offers the same promise to the vulnerable. You may have rights on paper but the law indicates that there is a hierarchy of lives worth living. The boundaries will be pushed and there will be little to hold back the sea.
Once the dam is breached, what has happened in other jurisdictions, has shown that resistance is futile. The net is cast further and further. The lines blur. Hard cases are used to justify bad law. We have seen it before, and we will see it again.
Even if Assisted Suicide was rejected in the UK, the Joint Oireachtas Committee recommendations show that little Ireland deludes itself that we are exceptional. It won’t happen here even though it happened everywhere else. But with the UK gone, rather than seeking to differentiate ourselves from our former colonial masters, we will look across the water and gain inspiration.
A consistent life ethic from conception to natural death, the seamless garment that Catholic writer Eileen Egan referred to, is either all or nothing. Once life is devalued at one stage, it is devalued in itself.
The increasing secularisation removes the reality that we are created beings from the ethics of life. Once we consider ourselves masters of our own destiny, and the masters of the destiny of other lives, there is no metaphysical or supernatural obstacle to the ever-increasing demand for acquiring the power of life over death.