by Alexander Chula, The Critic
Privileged supporters cannot seem to even understand the arguments against their case
The assisted dying debate has reached an impasse in recent months. Ever more nuanced concerns have been advanced by an ever wider range of stakeholders, only for advocates of the proposed legislation to parrot back the same arguments we heard at the start. “We are behind the rest of the world,” complained Kim Leadbeater again recently, as if assisted dying were a self-evident yardstick of human progress. Opponents are motivated by “undeclared religious beliefs”, added Esther Rantzen, for whom secular reservations are apparently inconceivable. Kit Malthouse, meanwhile, is still talking about drowning in faecal vomit, as if there were somehow a lobby in favour of this vanishingly rare phenomenon.
The inability to engage seriously with fears for society’s most vulnerable reflects a sad reality: that a chasm divides the bill’s proponents from those who stand to lose by it. It is an uncomfortable truth that enthusiasts of assisted dying are overwhelmingly middle class and privileged. This has been the demographic of every patient that has ever asked me or any of my colleagues about an assisted death, and is still more obviously that of prominent activists and politicians. These are people accustomed to very high degrees of personal agency, higher in fact than almost anyone has experienced in human history. Sadly — and though it may feel paternalistic to say so — we must also admit the existence of low-agency people. “This is about dignity and bodily autonomy”, Leadbeater reminded us again last week, but hers is a world view with little room for people who may never have experienced much of either.