It’s Good That You’re Alive

Jan 17, 2025 by

by Jamie Gillies, First Things:

Our desire is to obtain legal recognition for the principle that in cases of advanced and inevitably fatal disease . . . the sufferer, after legal inquiry and after due observance of all safeguards, shall have the right to demand and be entitled to receive release.” So began a 1936 debate on the first bill seeking to legalize doctor-assisted death in Britain, eighty-eight years before Parliament advanced Kim Leadbeater’s “assisted dying” bill on November 29.

Though almost a century apart, there are striking parallels between the 1936 debate on assisted death (or “release,” as the bill called it) and the contemporary one. Both involve bills brought by Labour parliamentarians. Both focus on people with “incurable” conditions seeking to end their lives with the assistance of doctors. And both involve objections to and concerns over the coercion of vulnerable people, and the infeasibility of “safeguards.”

Those arguing for and against assisted death in each era also looked similar. In the 1930s, church leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, were among the staunchest opponents. The same holds true today. In the thirties, celebrities such as the writer H. G. Wells were among the loudest proponents of assisted death. Today, British TV celebrities Esther Rantzen and Prue Leith (of Great British Bake Off fame) are among leading supporters of the bill.

There are big differences, of course. Most notable is the overtly eugenicist motives behind early attempts to change the law. The 1936 bill was produced by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (VES), which would later change its name to “Dignity in Dying.” VES founder Killick Millard believed that “feeble-minded and mentally deficient” people should be sterilized. He and his allies had no qualms about euthanizing “unproductive” citizens who had become a “burden.”

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