A Death Knell for Civilisation: Today’s vote is a dark day for Britain
by Laura Dodsworth on Substack:
Today is a dark day for Britain.
In a historic vote, the House of Commons has turned its back on the sanctity of life. By 330 votes to 275, MPs have approved draft legislation that allows terminally ill adults, expected to die within six months, to seek help to end their lives.
Palliative care consultant Dr Dominic Whitehouse begged MPs to vote with ‘wisdom and courage’. They did not. A 55-vote majority has declared that life is cheap.
Let us be clear: this is not ‘assisted dying’. That phrase belongs to the noble art of palliative care, which cherishes life even in its final moments. This is assisted suicide—a deliberate act to extinguish life. It is a seismic shift that should alarm anyone who values the moral fabric of our society.
History and modern examples alike offer lessons we are too blind or arrogant to heed. Take Oregon, often cited as a exemplary model for assisted suicide due to its so-called ‘Death with Dignity Act’. Oregon’s journey should give us pause. In 1998, just 16 assisted deaths were recorded; by 2022, that number had soared to 278. Over time, trends emerged that reveal the cost of this policy, not in pounds but in humanity.
Patients’ funding shifted from predominantly private to mostly state-funded healthcare (65% private in 1998; 79.5% government-supported in 2022). More patients reported feeling like a burden or struggling with financial worries as reasons for choosing death. Relationships between doctors and patients became transactional — shrinking from 18 weeks in 2010 to just five weeks in 2022. Psychiatric evaluations, designed to protect those in vulnerable states, remained astonishingly rare, hovering at just 1%.
What is dignified about this conveyor belt to death?
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