BISHOPS decried the proposed legalisation of assisted dying on Friday, as the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill came to the House of Lords for the first of two days of debate.
“If passed, this Bill will signal that we are a society that believes that some lives are not worth living,” the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, said. It would become, she said, the “state-endorsed position”.
Bishop Mullally, a former Chief Nursing Officer, questioned whether Parliament had properly listened to the advice of medical experts, including professional bodies which have expressed concerns about the legislation.
The Bill also failed in its “central claim” to give people choice about the manner of their death, she said. “A meaningful choice would see the measures in this Bill set alongside easily available, fully-funded, palliative and social-care services. Without a choice offered, this choice is an illusion.”
Bishop Mullally, who is the Church of England’s lead bishop on health care, suggested that she would be willing to table an amendment at the Third Reading that would allow peers to declare their view that, in principle, the Bill should not proceed.
She concluded her remarks by saying that she believed in a God “whose very being is life, and in that gift we can discover meaning, dignity, and innate worth, even if we are dying”.
The Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Revd Christopher Chessun, said that he was concerned that a change in the law would make the most vulnerable in society even more vulnerable. In the Old Testament, the principle term used for life was the Hebrew word hayim, he said. It was a relational term, encompassing both physical life and its source in God, which “encompasses mortality and the finality which takes us to our very last breath.
“We need to be immensely careful in supporting a departure from the practice and wisdom of centuries,” he said, and moving instead to a “consumerist” notion of life.
Christian belief is that life is intrinsically valuable at all its stages, he said. “There is never a point at which is could be said ‘It is not worth it,’ or ‘Life is not worth living.’”
Like Bishop Mullally, he called for better 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 legislation was being passed there, and had followed its implementation carefully.
A recent report in New Zealand had found that there was insufficient clarity on the principles underpinning the law, and she suggested that the same was true for the draft legislation 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 is about choice, “but I cannot see how this is true when the Bill is both unsafe and unworkable in its current form”, she said.
The “obsession with selfhood and individual choice belies our dignity and respect for others. In being human we begin not so much with selfhood, but with the idea of the other, and who we are in 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 legislation, 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 in the minority. In July, the General Synod condemned the legislation currently under consideration by a vote of 238-7, and called for greater funding for palliative care (News, 15 July).
THE Bill was introduced in the Lords on Friday morning by the former justice minister, the Labour peer Lord Falconer, who said that it contained more safeguards than any comparable legislation around 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 did not believe that they would “prevent people from being pressurised to end their lives, sometimes for the benefit for others”.
She also warned that the scope of the Bill could be expanded in the future. Lord Falconer had earlier sought to reassure peers that this could not happen without primary legislation.
“It is not an assisted dying Bill; it is an assisted suicide Bill,” she said. “As a society, we believe that suicide is wrong.”
Proponents of legal change have objected to the use of the term “assisted suicide”, considering it insensitive (News, 13 June). Figures in the Church of England, however, have increasingly used the term. Dr Hartley, on Friday, referred to the proposals as a “state-sponsored suicide service”, and earlier in the week the Church House press office circulated four testimonies, all opposed to 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 just disagreement between members on the issues, but also “within each of us . . . there are dilemmas of an almost indissoluble kind.”
A former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries, said that he respected those who campaigned for the Bill, and that he agreed with them on the importance of choice and reduction of suffering.
He said that, if the Bill was passed, there would inevitably be pressure to amend it in order to allow people who were suffering from unbearable pain, either mental or physical, but had longer than six months to live, to seek an assisted death.
There was, he said, a “nightmare scenario” in which assisted dying would become “the default option” due to increasing health problems and the “logic of compassion”; it was safer “not to go down this road at all”.
Other bishops, including two former archbishops, are scheduled to speak on the second day of the debate, next Friday. The current Lords Spiritual scheduled to speak next week are the Archbishop of York, and the Bishop of Chichester, Dr Martin Warner.
Archbishop Cottrell and Dr Warner were both present in the chamber on Friday morning, along with at least seven other bishops who were not scheduled to speak.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, and former Archbishop of York, Lord Sentamu, are also scheduled to speak next week. Lord Carey has been one of the few prominent voices in the Church of England to support the legalisation of assisted dying (Comment, 13 October 2023).
The legislation, 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 at 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 valuable, but they are valuable to God, so we can 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 part of the march.
