Historian Andrew Roberts let the cat out of the bag in his House of Lords speech in favour of assisted suicide: getting Christianity out of the way in which and reverting to pagan morality would make suicide socially acceptable.
On September 12, peers began debating Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales after MPs narrowly backed it within the House of Commons in June by 314 votes to 291.
Lord Roberts of Belgravia said throughout the Bill’s Second Reading debate: “The commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ could be suspended in exceptional circumstances, resembling in wartime, and so it ought to be within the case of the horrendous pain of an irreversible, slow death. Wanting to avoid such excruciating pain will not be selfish but a human right.
“Going back further in history, beyond Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, the theologians who proscribed suicide, the traditional Greeks and Romans recognised that there was nothing ignoble in it if the choice is way worse.
“It ought to be as much as the person, together with their doctor and family, protected by robust safeguards and oversight mechanisms, but lower than the state or the Church, to make your mind up whether she or he desires to escape pain and suffering of their final days. The autonomy to die on one’s own terms, not on those imposed by others, mustn’t be denied any longer.”
Roberts, a Conservative peer, is an excellent historian. His 2005 book, Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble, and his 2009 book, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, are outstanding works of history writing.
It was subsequently sad to see a British historian of such distinction extolling pagan Greece and Rome, and dismissing Christianity as a barrier to human autonomy, the unrestrained exercise of which is so prized by the permissive society.
Roberts can also be the writer of an acclaimed 2018 biography of the British War World II Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. How can the writer of Churchill: Walking with Destiny fail to understand the formative childhood influence of his evangelical Christian nanny, Elizabeth Everett, on the long run leader? It may be very arguable that without her spiritual and moral guidance, Churchill would never have taken the courageous stand against antisemitism that he did within the Thirties when that evil was quite fashionable among the many British upper classes.
It was heartening to listen to Toby Young, also a Conservative peer, make a robust speech against assisted suicide. Lord Young of Acton, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, shared the reservations of his sister, an NHS nurse who has spent much of her profession working in palliative care, in regards to the Bill:
“My sister acknowledges that, sooner or later, most palliative care patients express a want to die, whether due to pain, nausea or extreme fatigue, because they’re anxious about dying at home without adequate care or support, or because they feel they’ve turn into a burden on their families.
“However, in her experience, most of those patients change their minds when help does come, solutions are proposed and symptoms are alleviated, and so they are grateful for the chance to spend additional time with their family members.
“It is providing terminally ailing patients with these opportunities that makes the work of individuals in hospices so rewarding. It is why a lot of them do it. Their sense of vocation comes from wanting to enhance the health and extend the lifetime of their patients, not from accelerating their deaths.”
He disclosed his sister’s concern that attempting to “integrate an assisted dying service into probably the most overstretched parts of the NHS, with the inevitable bureaucracy and delays, the forms incorrectly filled in, the unreturned phone calls and the missed appointments” would make “the lives of terminally ailing patients much more miserable”.
He concluded: “She says that her job often seems like working in a war zone, and fears that the Bill, particularly as currently drafted, will only make things worse.”
Andrew Roberts is correct, nonetheless. Ultimately, it’s Christianity, with its belief that humanity is created by Almighty God in His image and that we will not be the results of evolutionary likelihood, which stands in the way in which of assisted suicide.
The House of Lords could vote down Leadbeater’s Private Member’s Bill. Because it will not be a Government Bill, peers will not be certain by the parliamentary ‘Salisbury Convention’ under which the Lords doesn’t block laws promised within the governing party’s election manifesto.
But if the Lords merely amends the Bill and it goes back to the House of Commons next 12 months, it’s to be feared that a majority of MPs might be guided by the pre-Christian morality that Roberts apparently commends, and provides assisted suicide the go-ahead.
Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
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