Thinking Out LoudLast month, British MPs voted (after many past rejections) to pass a law introducing assisted dying in England and Wales. Hailed as a compassionate and long overdue step forwards, or else a capitulation to a creeping culture of death, it’s an emotive and profoundly consequential issue.
Euthanasia makes me deeply uneasy, for a host of reasons. But I was struck, in reporting on the parliamentary debate, by the fact that those supporting and those opposing the bill were not necessarily who you’d expect. In a highly partisan age, where progressive or conservative views seem a bit of a package deal, it’s rare to see this level of genuine public wrestling with an issue, across political and religious lines.
Former foreign secretary James Cleverly, a Conservative MP, said he was an atheist but that he rejected the bill because of inadequate safeguards. Labour MP David Burton-Sampson said he had been against assisted dying because of his Christian faith, but that his constituents’ harrowing stories of loved ones dying excruciating deaths had led him to support it.
Some MPs spoke of their own losses. Conservative MP Mark Garnier said that his mother, who died of pancreatic cancer, suffered more than she would have under an assisted dying law, and voted yes. Labour’s Siobhain McDonagh said that her sister’s death from brain cancer would have been hastened under such a law, and voted no.
On the issues that matter most deeply to us, it’s easy to conclude that our opponents are not only wrong but wicked – motivated by selfishness, cruelty, or sheer stupidity. Can we believe each other – at least sometimes – when we say we care? It doesn’t preclude them (or me) being terribly wrong. But it might preclude us from dismissing or despairing of one another. That would be a start.
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.