by Charlotte Choley, The Critic
Britain’s debate over assisted suicide is being conducted in language designed to obscure what is actually proposed
The assisted suicide Bill is back before Parliament. So, too, is the elite insistence on not calling it assisted suicide.
In Britain, the campaign for legalisation has settled on the euphemism “assisted dying”: a phrase whose gentleness depends on its imprecision. To the uninitiated (or incurious) ear, it might seem to denote almost anything done for somebody approaching death — pain relief, hospice care or even the withdrawal of burdensome treatment.
Indeed, in a 2021 poll, only 43 per cent understood “assisted dying” to mean providing lethal drugs to somebody with less than six months to live. Almost as many thought it meant allowing a dying person to stop life-prolonging treatment; another 10 per cent thought it referred to hospice care.
A majority, in other words, took “assisted dying” to mean ordinary end-of-life care rather than deliberately helping someone to kill themselves.
Yet Labour MP Lauren Edwards has now announced that she is reintroducing Kim Leadbeater’s failed Bill: a proposal under which terminally ill adults who wished to die would be supplied with lethal drugs to take in order to kill themselves. That act already has a precise name — one acknowledged even by the NHS. It is assisted suicide.
Kim Leadbeater nevertheless repeatedly rejected that description of her bill, insisting that it concerned “assisted dying” instead. “We need to be really careful about the language we use around suicide,” she said. The irony was obvious: whatever its sponsor chose to call it, the criminal-law exemption on which the assisted suicide regime depended had to be written into the Suicide Act 1961.