Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: Lessons from Belgium edited by David Albert Jones, Chris Gastmans, Calum Mackellar, CUP, 378pp, £90
The push for assisted suicide and euthanasia is so slick and well-financed in Britain that it is a small miracle that the law has not changed in a way similar to that of other jurisdictions whose values we tend to share, such as Canada, some states of Australia and America and the more liberal nations of the European Union.
Every year brings a new challenge to the law in either the courts or Parliament and the media seem to have an endless stream of sympathetic stories about “mercy killing” or “dying with dignity”. Perhaps the reluctance of our politicians to capitulate to such pressure indicates that our democracy, by and large, remains functional and our elected representatives sometimes retain the capacity to reach the right conclusions when they are presented with facts instead of propaganda.
It is this commitment to establishing the truth about euthanasia that makes this volume so valuable. A collection of academic essays, it is dedicated to the late
Dr Kevin Fitzpatrick, a gallant opponent of euthanasia. It would be fair to assume therefore that the book has an anti-euthanasia bias, and so it has, but the arguments nonetheless rest on hard facts.
Yet this book also considers arguments from a pro-euthanasia perspective by including an essay written by four Belgian palliative care specialists – one of whom, Marc Desmet, is both a Jesuit and a doctor. They effectively laud euthanasia as a blessing that has enhanced, rather than undermined, the highly advanced system of palliative care in Belgium. The introduction of an additional element of patient choice into the dying process has meant that palliative care has been “forced to develop further”, they argue, with “more professional end-of-life care that better responds to patients’ wishes”. They add reassuringly that “there is no indication of an alarming increase in the number of euthanasia cases or of significant misuse of any medically assisted end-of-life decision”.
The article was written in 2013, and curiously it comes with a recent postscript which reads as a recantation. The same four authors, initially sympathetic to euthanasia, now say the practice is wrecking palliative care, with budgets for the sector being squeezed every year since 2008 as the number of euthanasia deaths rise incrementally. Clearly, the authors have woken up to the reality that the euthanasia movement cannot co-exist harmoniously with the palliative care movement, as they had hoped, but must destroy lest it “hinder the unimpeded performance of euthanasia”.
Today in Belgium, they conclude, euthanasia is “the new dying: timely, properly scheduled, highly economic, without ambiguities or uncertainties”, all fuelled by a fear of suffering which it is helping to create. In effect, the reader observes the peculiar spectacle of academics performing a U-turn in the space of a few pages.
These four are, of course, not the first euthanasia advocates to realise the folly of their ways. Professor Theo Boer, a Dutch euthanasia regulator shocked by a practice he once supported, warned British peers against Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill in 2014. “Don’t go there,” he told them. “Some slopes truly are slippery.” What British politicians must do, he suggested, was to heed the lessons from the experiments across the North Sea and English Channel.
That could be achieved simply by picking up this volume. In one particularly damning essay Benoit Beuselinck, an oncologist, reveals how the advance of pro-euthanasia ideology is turning civilised Belgium into a seemingly terrifying dystopia in which doctors have become killers, where palliative care is collapsing and where patients and their families are scared about receiving care in a hospice or hospital in case they are bumped off. The public, he suggests, have been duped into believing that they are enjoying more freedom, while in truth the absolute autonomy of patients to choose a lethal injection is exalted above all else.
Yet true freedom is diminished as more costly options, such as effective control of pain relief and symptoms up to a natural death, are eroded. There is also a contradiction in the cornerstone value of absolute autonomy, Beuselinck points out, since it doesn’t appear quite so absolute when it comes to the question of protecting the rights of institutions or doctors to object to delivering death.
This is how bad things are: hospital palliative care units, Beuselinck declares, are today at risk of becoming “houses of euthanasia”, the “opposite of what they were meant to be”, and nurses and social workers are walking out of their jobs as they see their function “reduced to preparing patients and their families for lethal injections”.
There you have it: human abattoirs and the abrogation of genuine liberty, and that is just the beginning. Legal euthanasia is not the “victory of postmodern man over suffering at the end of life”; it is the road to hell.
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