29 December 2016 Jewish News
www.jewishnews.co.uk
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Opinion
One truly moral side in assisted suicide debate LORD POLAK
A
s the House of Lords debates the Baroness Meacher's Bill to legalise assisted suicide there may be speculation about what the Jewish position is on this contentious question, or indeed if a fixed position exists at all. Assisted suicide and euthanasia, often referred to as “assisted dying”, are issues about which people feel strongly on both sides, informed sometimes by personal experience as well as by strongly-held moral convictions. It is significant nonetheless that there is a settled Jewish position on this question and it was articulated with great insight by the late Rabbi Lord Sacks when an almost identical Bill was introduced some six years ago. The former Chief Rabbi was crystal clear in his opinion that “the Jewish tradition, going back many centuries, is strongly opposed to such acts”. “Life is sacred,” he wrote in The Times ahead of a parliamentary debate. “It is God’s gift, not ours. It is the physician’s responsibility to heal, not harm, even if the patient requests it.
Despite Judaism’s strong emphasis on human choice, free will and personal responsibility, we believe there are certain things we may not do, even out of great compassion.” The chief danger of legalising assisted suicide, he continued, “is the deconsecration of life”, adding that “the history of societies that have sanctioned euthanasia in the past is not an encouraging one”. I cannot imagine Rabbi Sacks would have changed his mind about assisted suicide an iota. His opposition would have been philosophical too. He would have understood lucidly that the idea of assisted suicide has gained traction and popularity beyond its historical eugenicist support base largely because of the prevailing ideology of absolute autonomy, which he personally abhorred. His great final book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, was essentially a tract against this ideology, a heartfelt appeal for the restoration of the primacy of the “we” into the social life of the nation over the all-consuming and self-centred “I”, which he believed was at the root of endemic family breakdown and markets operating without
morals, among other evils. Yet nothing embodies the ideology of absolute autonomy, of unbridled individualism, quite like assisted suicide and euthanasia. The Meacher Bill demands we dispense with laws and medical ethical traditions that have protected the weak, the vulnerable, the elderly and the disabled for millennia to fulfil the desires of a small number who wish to take their own lives or assist in the deaths of others. Last week, Conservative politicians in both Houses received a powerful letter jointly signed by Devizes MP Danny Kruger, chair of the AllParty Parliamentary Group for Dying Well, and by Michael Howard, the former chair of Hospice UK who now sits in the second chamber as Lord Howard of Lympne. It was reassuring not only in its clarity about the dangers inherent in the Bill and the need to protect vulnerable people from
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those who see them as a burden, or their deaths an expedient way to either save or make money, but also because it offered a vision of a better way of addressing the question of human suffering. They advocated greater investment in palliative care so that all people might have the serene and pain-free natural deaths they deserve. “Rather than changing the law to allow the prescription of lethal drugs, we should be putting all our energies into improving access to the best possible care,” they wrote. This is surely the position more in keeping with the finest traditions of Judaism. It represents an expression of community, of mutual support, of help for the weakest, of intergenerational solidarity and a concern for the common good. There is surely only one side of this debate which, in good conscience, we can take.
'LIFE IS SACRED,' WROTE RABBI SACKS. 'GOD'S GIFT, NOT OURS. THERE ARE THINGS WE MAY NOT DO