BISHOPS decried the proposed legalisation of assisted dying on Friday, because the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill got here to the House of Lords for the primary of two days of debate.
“If passed, this Bill will signal that we’re a society that believes that some lives aren’t price living,” the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, said. It would develop into, she said, the “state-endorsed position”.
Bishop Mullally, a former Chief Nursing Officer, questioned whether Parliament had properly listened to the recommendation of medical examiners, including skilled bodies which have expressed concerns concerning the laws.
The Bill also failed in its “central claim” to provide people selection concerning the manner of their death, she said. “A meaningful selection would see the measures on this Bill set alongside easily available, fully-funded, palliative and social-care services. Without a selection offered, this selection is an illusion.”
Bishop Mullally, who’s the Church of England’s lead bishop on health care, suggested that she can be willing to table an amendment on the Third Reading that will allow peers to declare their view that, in principle, the Bill shouldn’t proceed.
She concluded her remarks by saying that she believed in a God “whose very being is life, and in that gift we will discover meaning, dignity, and innate price, even when we’re dying”.
The Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Revd Christopher Chessun, said that he was concerned that a change within the law would make essentially the most vulnerable in society much more vulnerable. In the Old Testament, the principle term used for all times was the Hebrew word hayim, he said. It was a relational term, encompassing each physical life and its source in God, which “encompasses mortality and the finality which takes us to our very last breath.
“We have to be immensely careful in supporting a departure from the practice and wisdom of centuries,” he said, and moving as a substitute to a “consumerist” notion of life.
Christian belief is that life is intrinsically helpful in any respect its stages, he said. “There isn’t a degree at which is might be said ‘It is just not price it,’ or ‘Life is just not price living.’”
Like Bishop Mullally, he called for higher funding for palliative and social care.
The Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, also spoke on Friday morning. She was a Bishop in New Zealand when laws was being passed there, and had followed its implementation rigorously.
A recent report in New Zealand had found that there was insufficient clarity on the principles underpinning the law, and she or he suggested that the identical was true for the draft laws being considered in England.
Dr Hartley said that she would support an amendment proposed by Baroness Berger, which calls for a select committee to be convened to scrutinise the Bill further.
Proponents of the Bill say that it’s about selection, “but I cannot see how that is true when the Bill is each unsafe and unworkable in its current form”, she said.
The “obsession with selfhood and individual selection belies our dignity and respect for others. In being human we start not a lot with selfhood, but with the thought of the opposite, and who we’re within the realisation of community and society,” she said.
The next speaker, Lord Baker, a former Home Secretary, said that, while the bishops were clearly against the laws, many Anglican churchgoers, including himself, were “very keen on assisted dying”.
Some polls have suggested that a majority of Anglicans support assisted dying, while others have concluded that the view is within the minority. In July, the General Synod condemned the laws currently into account by a vote of 238-7, and called for greater funding for palliative care (News, 15 July).
THE Bill was introduced within the Lords on Friday morning by the previous justice minister, the Labour peer Lord Falconer, who said that it contained more safeguards than any comparable laws all over the world, and that, in other jurisdictions, palliative care had improved after assisted dying was legalised.
The former Prime Minister Baroness May disagreed on the safeguards, saying that she didn’t imagine that they might “prevent people from being pressurised to finish their lives, sometimes for the profit for others”.
She also warned that the scope of the Bill might be expanded in the longer term. Lord Falconer had earlier sought to reassure peers that this might not occur without primary laws.
“It is just not an assisted dying Bill; it’s an assisted suicide Bill,” she said. “As a society, we imagine that suicide is mistaken.”
Proponents of legal change have objected to using the term “assisted suicide”, considering it insensitive (News, 13 June). Figures within the Church of England, nevertheless, have increasingly used the term. Dr Hartley, on Friday, referred to the proposals as a “state-sponsored suicide service”, and earlier within the week the Church House press office circulated 4 testimonies, all against the Bill, under the heading “assisted suicide Bill stories”.
During Friday’s debate, the Liberal Democrat peer and retired doctor Lord Alderdice, said that there was not only disagreement between members on the problems, but additionally “inside each of us . . . there are dilemmas of an almost indissoluble kind.”
A former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries, said that he respected those that campaigned for the Bill, and that he agreed with them on the importance of selection and reduction of suffering.
However, he said that, if the Bill was passed, there would inevitably be pressure to amend it with a view to allow individuals who were affected by unbearable pain, either mental or physical, but had longer than six months to live, to hunt an assisted death.
There was, he said, a “nightmare scenario” during which assisted dying would develop into “the default option” as a consequence of increasing health problems and the “logic of compassion”; it was safer “to not go down this road in any respect”.
A former Liberal Democrat MP, Baroness Featherstone, addressed opponents on religious grounds of the laws, and said that assisted dying wouldn’t be compulsory. “If your religious convictions require that you simply don’t reap the benefits of this Bill, then please have compassion and enable us who do not need your convictions to have the proper to decide on.”
The former Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology within the University of Oxford, Lord Biggar, who’s an Anglican priest, said that “compassion is a virtue, but it surely must look in a couple of direction, and distribute itself equitably.”
He said that without improvements in state-funded end-of-life care, the laws risked creating an “unjust inequality of autonomies” during which the privileged were capable of make a meaningful selection, while “others — poorer and fewer white — would have to choose from grievous suffering and killing themselves.”
Other bishops, including two former archbishops, are scheduled to talk on the second day of the talk, next Friday. The current Lords Spiritual scheduled to talk next week are the Archbishop of York, and the Bishop of Chichester, Dr Martin Warner.
Archbishop Cottrell and Dr Warner were each present within the chamber for not less than a part of the talk on Friday, together with nine bishops who weren’t scheduled to talk.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, and former Archbishop of York, Lord Sentamu, are also scheduled to talk next week. Lord Carey has been one among the few outstanding voices within the Church of England to support the legalisation of assisted dying (Comment, 13 October 2023).
The laws, which was first brought as a Private Member’s Bill by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, cleared the House of Commons in June, by a narrow majority of 23 votes (News, 27 June).
A eucharist was held at St James’s, Garlickhythe, in London, on Saturday, before the annual March for Life. More than 40 people were in attendance on the service, which was led by Dr Warner.
The Vicar of St Augustine’s, Tooting, and Holy Trinity, Upper Tooting, the Revd Angela Rayner, preached. She said that “the unborn, the pregnant, the elderly, those living with messy complex needs . . . the world may not call them helpful, but they’re helpful to God, so we will call them loved.”
Organisers of the March for Life UK estimated that about 10,000 people attended the ecumenical Christian event, during which marchers went from Westminster Cathedral towards Parliament Square. More than 40 members of the group C of E Voices for Life were a part of the march.
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