by Aidan Harte, The Critic
Assisted suicide is not enlightened but a step towards a new dark age
This year, Westminster will decriminalise abortion up to birth and legalised assisted suicide in England and Wales — a neat illustration of C. S. Lewis’s maxim that, “The devil always sends errors into the world in pairs”.
Like Merlin, C. S. Lewis seemed to live life backwards. In the secularising Britain of 1930, he turned to God. Young, he looked forward to being “old enough to read fairytales again”. Old, he described his wrinkles as, “honourable insignia of long service”. This resignation to mortality sounds heretical in the age of Botox but then C. S. Lewis had something that we claim to live without: faith.
Rights cannot exist without faith either. A fellow who supports a right does not say, “I think it’s a nice idea.” Instead he puffs out his chest and proclaims, “I believe in the right to X.” Why make the case for a thing that already exists? No one has to argue for a mountain. A mountain simply is. But rights are not like mountains. Rights are a shared fiction, like money — and you won’t get far if the shopkeeper doesn’t believe the paper in your wallet is worth something.
Rights are also contagious. Voters in neighbouring jurisdictions soon wonder what they are missing. In Ireland, an influential minority is eager to follow Britain’s lead on euthanasia. The groundwork has been laid by a series of incremental parliamentary manoeuvres similar to those taken in Westminster. In 2024, the Irish parliament voted 76/53 to “take note” of a committee report recommending the introduction of euthanasia. Legislation is now before the lower house, but such a radical change would normally be put directly to the people. Unlike Britain, the referendum has a defined constitutional role in Ireland. The electorate is used to them and, on questions with profound legal and social ramifications, we expect to be directly consulted. The legalisation of gay marriage and abortion in 2015 and 2018 made referenda very popular with the government but last year’s referendum on Family and Care was roundly rejected, a humiliation that precipitated the resignation of the prime minister Leo Varadkar. The current government is loath to run the risk of another such embarrassment.