Assisted Dying - compassionate or callous?

9/11 is one date we’ll never forget.  This year, it’s important for another reason – the date the Assisted Dying Bill is being debated in Parliament.

Whilst the scriptures are clear that there is a time to live and a time to die, and the days ordained for us are written in God’s book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139) man is determined to play God.  Aided and abetted by media spin, the ‘Assisted Dying Bill’ does not speed people towards a natural death, but rather sanctions state sponsored killing.  The impact of the Bill goes far beyond just those vulnerable people in need of care because it allows doctors to give lethal drugs to their patients.

As Christians we know that each person is created in the image of God and has equal value.  That is what gives us a basis for treating everyone with dignity and respect and caring for the sick, elderly and disabled.  Belief in the God-given value of human life is what led to transformational change such as the abolition of slavery and the establishment of legal rights for ordinary people.  This Bill attacks this foundation by implying that some lives are not worth living.  It denies that we’re made in the image of God and therefore strikes at the very heart of humanity.  As Francis Schaeffer said:

If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity.  There is no good reason why mankind should be protected as special.  Human life is cheapened.

Back in the first half of the twentieth century, a New Age guru named Alice Bailey penned Satan’s strategy for destroying the Church and creating what was believed to be a godless utopia.  One of the main planks in the strategy was to make abortion easy and legal.  Infant mortality by abortion has mushroomed since abortion was legalised in 1967 and now is viewed by our godless society as a woman’s human right.  Certainly human life has been cheapened by this appalling practice.

Bailey didn’t mention euthanasia specifically, but it follows that if killing babies in the womb is legal, the culture of legalised death should also extend to ending life at other stages.  No doubt this is also part of Satan’s strategy.

Consequently, deceit and darkness surround the campaign for assisted suicide.  Television documentaries, docu-dramas and soaps highlight individual cases which pull at the public’s heart-strings.  The message they declare is that allowing suffering people to kill themselves is the compassionate thing to do.  But this is deliberately designed to deceive.  The truth is that the right to kill leads to callousness not compassion. Indeed, if medical professionals have the power to end the lives of their patients and they become hardened to causing death, patients will quickly lose trust in them and people will genuinely fear for their lives.

Callousness quickly takes hold as this quote from Lord McColl illustrates.  He visited The Netherlands back in 2003 where assisted suicide and euthanasia have been legal since 2001:

Noble Lords will be aware that the Select Committee visited Holland.  When we inquired of a doctor what it was like doing the first case of euthanasia, he said, ‘We agonised all day.  It was terrible’.  But he said that the second case was much easier and the third case – I quote – ‘was a piece of cake’.  We found that very chilling indeed.

In a similar way to the massive increase in abortions over the years since 1967, where assisted suicide and euthanasia have been legalised the numbers have increased dramatically.  In Oregon, the number of assisted deaths rose by 430% between 1998 and 2013.  In Washington State, the number increased by 248% between 2009 and 2013.  In Belgium, the number of euthanasia deaths increased by 242% in six years.  Belgian doctors are now hastening the deaths of one in four euthanasia victims without their consent.  What’s more, the laws have been extended to include sick and disabled children.

When Alice Bailey articulated Satan’s plan, the last point on the list was to get the State and the Church to endorse and support all the previous points.  These included, for example, removing the concept of marriage for life; accepting homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle; and removing parental responsibility for children.  To a large degree, today the State has endorsed all the points in the Plan.  All that remains is for the Church to do the same.

It is therefore distressing to note that the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has come out in support of the Assisted Dying Bill.  He says that allowing doctors to help patients take their own lives is a ‘profoundly Christian and moral thing’ to do.  He is, at present, out of sync with the Church of England, which is currently opposing the Bill, but times will change!  And Lord Carey is not alone in supporting the Bill.

It’s unlikely that any of us will forget the date, because of 9/11 in 2001.  Please pray both beforehand and on the day, that the Bill will be defeated – the compassionate and Godly way forward for the most vulnerable in our society.

Thanks to Christian Concern (www.christianconcern.com) for some of the information in this article.

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