by Mike Judge, Evangelical Times
Thank God, given the movement’s dark history
Earlier today, the House of Commons voted against the assisted suicide bill. We can rejoice, for now, that the vulnerable and the elderly have been protected from this sinister proposal. The arguments against this appalling legalisation have been well rehearsed. But what is not so well known is the dark history of the main lobby group pushing for change.
The so-called ‘Dignity in Dying’ campaign has had more rebranding exercises than Prince Harry has had job titles. The movement has had various monikers over the years. But Daniel Friery, who works in public affairs at The Christian Institute, has done us all a favour by digging into the history of the movement. And it turns out, its history is very dark indeed.
He has recently examined the archives of Dignity in Dying, held at the Wellcome Collection in London. His findings raise uncomfortable questions about the organisation’s origins and the philosophy which has driven the euthanasia movement in Britain.
Dignity in Dying was originally founded in 1935 as the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society (VELS) by Dr C. Killick Millard, a medical eugenicist. Its stated aim was to legalise voluntary euthanasia for incurably ill patients. Yet Millard’s arguments went beyond compassion for those facing suffering. In 1936 he described voluntary euthanasia of the sick, ‘a last service to society by relieving it of a useless burden.’
A ‘useless burden’? That language matters. One of the central objections to assisted suicide today is that vulnerable people may eventually feel pressure to end their lives because they believe themselves to be a burden on their families or on society. Friery’s research suggests that this concern is not merely a modern fear about an unintended consequence. The idea that someone might reasonably choose death because their continued existence places a burden on others was present in the thinking of the movement’s early advocates.
The Society’s own literature referred to people being distressed that their survival placed a strain on those caring for them and depleted family finances. Research commissioned by the Society in 1982 found that 20 per cent of its members gave a desire ‘not to be a burden to others’ as a reason for joining the campaign, compared with only 6 per cent who cited fear of unnecessary suffering or pain.
The movement’s history also has an uncomfortable relationship with eugenics. Millard himself supported eugenic policies, including the sterilisation of people regarded as ‘feeble-minded’. And the Society’s first chairman, C.J. Bond, spoke of mankind taking greater control over human evolution and human destiny, including responsibility for ‘entrance into and exit from life’.
There was also a strikingly open attitude towards suicide itself. In 1970 the Society’s chairman, the Rev A.B. Downing, spoke of educating the public towards ‘the rightness of suicide and assisted suicide’. In 1981 the Society published a controversial suicide manual, A Guide to Self-Deliverance, and its former general secretary Nicholas Reed was jailed after becoming involved in an underground service supplying lethal drugs.
The organisation’s historical attitude towards safeguards is equally revealing. Earlier campaigners sometimes argued that safeguards were unnecessary or cumbersome. None of this proves that every modern supporter of assisted dying shares the beliefs of the movement’s founders. Nor does it mean that every argument for changing the law is motivated by eugenics. But history matters. It can reveal assumptions which fashionable language conceals.
Today’s debate is presented in terms of compassion, dignity and choice. Christians should certainly care about compassion, dignity and the suffering of the dying. But biblical Christianity begins with a different understanding of human worth. Human beings do not possess value because they are healthy, independent, productive or free from suffering. They possess value because they are made in the image of God.
The danger is that once society accepts the principle that some lives may be better ended than continued, the language of choice can gradually become the pressure of expectation. The dark and sinister past of the euthanasia movement should therefore make us ask what view of human life lies beneath it.
Daniel Friery’s article on the dark past of the Euthanasia movement was first published by The Critic, and you can read it in full here.