BISHOPS decried the proposed legalisation of assisted dying, as the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill came to the House of Lords on Friday for the first of two days of debate.
“If passed, this Bill will signal that we are a society that believes that some lives are not worth living,” the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, said. It would become, she said, the “state-endorsed position”.
Bishop Mullally, a former Chief Nursing Officer, questioned whether Parliament had properly listened to the advice of medical experts, including professional bodies that have expressed concerns about the legislation.
The Bill also failed in its “central claim” to give people choice about the manner of their death, she said. “A meaningful choice would see the measures in this Bill set alongside easily available, fully funded palliative and social-care services. Without a choice offered, this choice is an illusion.”
Bishop Mullally, who is the Church of England’s lead bishop on health care, suggested that she would be willing to table an amendment at the Third Reading to allow peers to declare their view that, in principle, the Bill should not proceed.
She concluded by saying that she believed in a God “whose very being is life, and in that gift we can discover meaning, dignity, and innate worth, even if we are dying”.
The Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Revd Christopher Chessun, said that he was concerned that a change in the law would make the most vulnerable in society even more vulnerable. In the Old Testament, the principal term used for life was the Hebrew word hayim.
It was a relational term, encompassing both physical life and its source in God, which “encompasses mortality and the finality which takes us to our very last breath. We need to be immensely careful in supporting a departure from the practice and wisdom of centuries,” and moving instead to a “consumerist” notion of life, he said.
Christian belief was that life was intrinsically valuable at all its stages. “There is never a point at which is could be said ‘It is not worth it,’ or ‘Life is not worth living.’”
Like Bishop Mullally, he called for better funding for palliative and social care.
The Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, also spoke on Friday morning. She was a bishop in New Zealand when legislation was being passed there, and had followed its implementation carefully.
A recent report in New Zealand had found that there was insufficient clarity on the principles underpinning the law, and she suggested that the same was true for the draft legislation in England.
Dr Hartley said that she would support an amendment from Baroness Berger, which calls for a select committee to be convened to scrutinise the Bill further.
Proponents of the Bill said that it was about choice, the Bishop said, “but I cannot see how this is true when the Bill is both unsafe and unworkable in its current form.”
The “obsession with selfhood and individual choice belies our dignity and respect for others. In being human we begin not so much with selfhood, but with the idea of the other, and who we are in the realisation of community and society.”
The next speaker, Lord Baker, a former Home Secretary, said that, while the Bishops were clearly against the legislation, many Anglican churchgoers, including himself, were “very keen on assisted dying”.
Some polls have suggested that a majority of Anglicans support assisted dying, while others have concluded that the view is in the minority. In July, the General Synod condemned the legislation currently under consideration by a vote of 238-7, and called for greater funding for palliative care (News, 15 July).
THE Bill was introduced in the Lords on Friday morning by the former Justice Minister Lord Falconer (Labour), who said that it contained more safeguards than any comparable legislation around the world, and that, in other jurisdictions, palliative care had improved after assisted dying had been legalised.
The former Prime Minister Baroness May disagreed on the safeguards, saying that she did not believe that they would “prevent people from being pressurised to end their lives, sometimes for the benefit for others”.
She also warned that the scope of the Bill could be expanded in the future. Lord Falconer had earlier sought to reassure peers that this could not happen without primary legislation. “It is not an assisted-dying Bill: it is an assisted-suicide Bill,” she said. “As a society, we believe that suicide is wrong.”
Proponents of legal change have objected to the use of the term “assisted suicide”, considering it insensitive (News, 13 June). Figures in the Church of England, however, have increasingly used the term. Dr Hartley, last Friday, referred to the proposals as a “state-sponsored suicide service”, and earlier in the week the Church House media centre circulated four testimonies, all opposed to the Bill, under the heading “assisted suicide Bill stories”.
During last Friday’s debate, Lord Alderdice (Liberal Democrat), a retired doctor, said that there was not just disagreement between members on the issues, but also “within each of us . . . there are dilemmas of an almost indissoluble kind.”
The former Bishop of Oxford Lord Harries said that he respected campaigneres for the Bill, and that he agreed with them on the importance of choice and reduction of suffering.
If the Bill was passed, however, there would inevitably be pressure to amend it to allow people who were suffering unbearable pain, either mental or physical, but had longer than six months to live, to seek an assisted death.
There was, he said, a “nightmare scenario” in which assisted dying would become “the default option”, owing to increasing health problems and the “logic of compassion”. It was safer “not to go down this road at all”.
A former Liberal Democrat MP, Baroness Featherstone, addressed opponents on religious grounds of the legislation, and said that assisted dying would not be compulsory. “If your religious convictions require that you do not take advantage of this Bill, then please have compassion and enable us who do not have your convictions to have the right to choose.”
The former Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford Lord Biggar, who is an Anglican priest, said that “compassion is a virtue, but it needs to look in more than one direction, and distribute itself equitably.”
He said that, without improvements in state-funded end-of-life care, the legislation risked creating an “unjust inequality of autonomies” in which the privileged were able to make a meaningful choice, while “others — poorer and less white — would have to choose between grievous suffering and killing themselves.”
Other bishops, including two former archbishops, are scheduled to speak on the second day of the debate, today. The current Lords Spiritual scheduled to speak next week are the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Chichester, Dr Martin Warner.
Archbishop Cottrell and Dr Warner were both present in the chamber for at least part of the debate on Friday, together with nine bishops not scheduled to speak.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey and former Archbishop of York Lord Sentamu are also scheduled to speak next week. Lord Carey has been one of the few prominent voices in the Church of England to support the legalisation of assisted dying (Comment, 13 October 2023).
The legislation, first brought as a Private Member’s Bill by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, cleared the House of Commons in June, by a narrow majority of 23 votes (News, 27 June).
A eucharist celebrated by Dr Warner at St James’s, Garlickhythe, in London, on Saturday, before the annual March for Life. More than 40 people were in attendance.
The Vicar of St Augustine’s, Tooting, and Holy Trinity, Upper Tooting, the Revd Angela Rayner, preached. She said that “the unborn, the pregnant, the elderly, those living with messy complex needs . . . — the world may not call them valuable, but they are valuable to God, so we can call them loved.”
Organisers of the March for Life UK, an ecumenical Christian event, estimated that about 10,000 people attended it. The marchers went from Westminster Cathedral towards Parliament Square. More than 40 members of the group C of E Voices for Life took part.