No Freedom in Death

So England sank to grief. So dawn goes down to gray. Nobody old can stay.

The U.K. Parliament, by a decent-margin vote, vaulted over the first legislative hurdle for a bill legalizing assisted suicide. The final vote will take place in half a year’s time, but the clock is a mere formality. The bill will assuredly pass into law—the last roll will be, in Roy Bean logic, perfunctory. In another send-up of American lawmaking, the measure’s full text was introduced a mere eighteen days before the first legislative ballot. MP Kim Leadbetter, the bill’s lead cheerleader, took a page out of the Nancy Pelosi playbook: Parliament must first pass the “Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life)” bill to find out what’s fully in it.

British journalist Ed West is always flapping his stiff upper lip about America’s reverse “psychological colonialism” of Britain, including imparting our many woke tenets. But now it seems our Mother Country is taking legislative cues from its emancipated child. Even the legalized life-snuffing law itself is mirrored after similar policy in the King’s former colonies: Australia, Canada, and the depressing winter wonderland of Minnesota, whose governor has spent the past month begging supporters of his failed Veep campaign not to commit seppuku en masse, Jonestown style.

At least Tim Walz is exhorting blue voters to, in the Deuteronomy dialect, “choose life,” even if he signed into law one of the most liberally lax abortion laws in the nation. What’s the Brits’ excuse for bureaucratizing the bier, besides living under the bowled-gloom cast by London’s soiled clouds?

If you guessed the left’s double-tongued insistence on bodily freedom as the pathway to healthy happiness, you’d be on the mark. Assisted “dying,” we’re informed by the better informed Leadbetter, is all about expanding “personal choice and autonomy.” After all, suicide is a homophone of “I decide,” is it not?

OW! It appears MP Leadbetter just tossed a boiled roll at my head. She objects to the s-word being used as a descriptor to her law. Tory MP Danny Kruger committed the same solecism during debate over the bill. He was thusly chastised by a miffed Labour MP Catherine Eccles, who fatuously fumed, “It’s not suicide. That’s offensive. Please correct your language.”

Do you follow? It’s no longer suicide to kill yourself. It’s actually freedom’s fulfillment. What’s the next definition to be matted and pretzeled to the point of losing all meaning? Will war be called peace? A Big Mac relabeled a healthy salad? Kamala Harris celebrated as an adept and merited politician?

As Orwell long recognized, by policing language, by draining words of their implicit understanding, you can curtail opposition. Hence the wordplay deployed by backers of assisted offing. What kind of Obergruppenführer oaf would be against “personal choice”? Why can’t bluenosed fussbudgets just beg off?

The same objection could be posed to pushers of aided suicide. Why does the perverse practice of self-annihilation necessitate lawful recognition? How is it an expansion of personal rights to employ government hangmen on behalf of someone who can’t uncap a Tylenol bottle? What kind of sad sack requires the state’s stamp of approval to eat a shotgun barrel? Here’s some cold advice: if you’re unable to muster the courage to fling yourself off a bridge, maybe you don’t deserve a doctor sitting you down comfortably in an ergonomic chair before administering your lethal cocktail. And it certainly shouldn’t be reimbursable through your insurance company. The very image of a bespectacled bean counter computing the chargeable cost of self-slaughter is parodic, even grotesque.

Suicide has repulsive connotations, because the concept—the deliberate taking of one’s life, often with sanguine aftermath—inspires aversion within our natural proclivity for survival. If you walk into the street and a car careens around a corner and scuds toward you, your brain shoots reflexive synapses to your legs, ordering a leap to safety. But to stay put and brace for fateful impact? Choosing death is an affront to God, nature, or common sense—whatever your metaphysical mileage may be.

(Camus famously called suicide the “one truly serious philosophical problem.” Sounds like Mr. Existential should have traded tomes for more soaks at Les Sablettes.)

A society abetting its own destruction isn’t interested in personal liberation. So why is the neoliberal coalition of liberal technocrats like Leadbetter and conservative money-pinchers like former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on board with sanctioned felo de se? The proof is in the pecuniary. The National Health Service is a perennial pound-burner. For the good of the fisc, why not gently goad grandma into giving up the ghost a few years earlier than she was expecting, so she’s not running up a dole tab on feeding tubes, ventilators, and round-the-clock care aides? In the bureaucratic cosmovision, compassion is in the heart of the collective. Sacrifices must be made—not by the dimwitted, impressionable, or mentally slow, of course. But by the responsible, sacrificial, liver-spotted population who’ve had their turn on the earth’s fine tilt, and should make room for those who can hoist themselves off the loo without snapping a tibia.

Safeguards, the Britons are well assured, will be established to protect the vulnerable. Any adventurous soul who musters up the courage to throw in the towel will be vetted for mental deficiency, outside influence, or even pressure from vulturine in-laws eager for inheritance. Only the most diligent administrators will be made daimyos of death.

But as anyone who’s ever had a tax issue with the IRS knows, the smoothest running bureaucracies can hit a bum note. And with the provisioning of poison, any mistake is more than an accounting blunder or an Excel error—it’s an execution.

A Canadian whistleblower recently disclosed a trove of documents detailing hundreds of instances where Ontarian authorities failed to follow the medical assistance in dying (MAID) regulations. Most egregious of the violations were cases in which “patients who were euthanized who may not have been capable of consent.” Worse, the negligent practitioners were never referred to law enforcement for actually killing someone who did not want to die.

I know Canadians have trouble with lexical accuracy—they call cheese fries “poutine” for maple leaf’s sake—but most Westerners would name the dispatching of a hapless individual a murder. Bah! Those dastardly words and definitions are just so mean by Canada’s be-nice standards.

Ashley Frawley calls “assisted dying” the “quintessential policy of our times,” because it brings the Grim Reaper under government control. What’s sold as a benison of liberty is really just a craven calculus to shave down entitlement spends. The public actuaries get their heads and their budget surplus.

Euthanasia supporters would do well to read the closing lines of Chesterton’s “A Ballade of Suicide” and find life and hope beyond cold utility:

Rationalists are growing rational–/And through thick woods one finds a stream astray/So secret that the very sky seems small–/I think I will not hang myself to-day.