Gerald Warner: Purdy verdict boosts our creeping culture of death

Published on Saturday 1 August 2009 20:01

THE culture of death received at least a minor impetus last week from the Law Lords' judgment in the case of Debbie Purdy, the woman suffering from multiple sclerosis who demanded that the Director of Public Prosecutions should be obliged to publish the criteria he would invoke when deciding whether or not to prosecute those assisting British subjects to commit suicide abroad.

The main fault, of course, lies with the DPP, whose failure to enforce the law of the land when it conflicts with the aspirations of the "progressive consensus", is wholly contemptible. The obvious point where a line should have been drawn in the sand was last October, when the 23-year-old paralysed rugby player Daniel James was taken by his parents to the notorious Dignitas "clinic" in Switzerland and put to death. Whatever future developments there may be in treating spinal injuries, that young man will not be around to benefit. That was a clear-cut case for prosecution.

"A milestone in the quest for assisted suicide" was how the BBC, without a scintilla of impartiality, hailed the Purdy verdict, though it graciously broadcast a 20-second soundbite from an opponent of euthanasia; from which we can adduce that the corporation that has led the charge during every previous drive towards degeneracy in Britain is once again "pushing the boundaries".

The Law Lords' judgment came just three weeks after the House of Lords, in a division involving 335 peers, had voted by a significant majority against legalising assisted suicide. Law should be made in parliament, not on the judicial bench. In Scotland, Margo MacDonald, the independent MSP, is campaigning for the legalisation of assisted suicide and a Labour MP, David Winnick, is to introduce a bill at Westminster. This is a misguided endeavour.

The tragedy of the "right to die" crusade is that it enlists the sympathy of the well-intentioned. Compassion for human suffering is the generous instinct it exploits: the further agenda is not advertised. The most heart-rending examples of terminal illness are advanced to lower the resistance of the public to an ultimately sinister proposal; but hard cases make bad laws. We have been here before: remember the debate preceding the Abortion Act, when we were assured the most restrictive conditions would apply, though today the reality is abortion on demand.

The Netherlands, the most degenerate society in Europe, is the template for a nation that embraces euthanasia. Years ago Dr Ben Zylicz, a Dutch palliative care physician, gave evidence to the House of Lords that in 1995 alone there had been 900 cases of non-voluntary euthanasia in Holland. A study in The Lancet in 1997 showed that 8 per cent of all Dutch infant deaths were by lethal injection, on grounds of disability. German doctors were hanged for the same conduct in 1945. By 1997 there were 1,000 Dutch patients a year being killed without requesting it. The practice is now so common it is simply called "Termination without request or consent".

The Dutch euthanasia figures are misleading since almost half of all cases are not even reported. The increase is relentless: 2008 saw a 10 per cent rise on the previous year and this year is projected to be higher still. Belgium has gone down the same road: the very first case flagrantly broke the law, now largely disregarded. Belgian activists have been pressing for the right of minors to demand euthanasia. As the Netherlands demonstrates, legalised assisted suicide leads to a drastic decline in the quality of palliative care, a degradation of the status of disabled people and an increasing eagerness to kill patients suffering from psychiatric illnesses, notably otherwise curable depression.

"It would never be like that here." Don't you believe it. The outrageous decision by the Royal College of Nursing to change its stance from opposition to assisted suicide to "neutrality" was supposedly reached after "consultation". In fact only 1,200 of the RCN's 390,000 members responded to the consultation of whom 49 per cent supported assisted suicide. So, why is the RCN changing course at the behest of around 600 members out of 390,000? The Royal Colleges of Physicians, General Practitioners, Psychiatrists and Anaesthetists all oppose legalisation.

When the Second World War ended, after exacting a toll of millions of lives, and the Nazi death camps were liberated, there was a sobering recognition of the value of human life. Since that moment of enlightenment, a perverse culture of death has gradually prevailed. Contraception has divorced sexual activity from procreation; pregnancy is regarded ambivalently; abortion has killed hundreds of millions worldwide while, perversely, murderers' lives have become sacrosanct.

Now euthanasia is placing infants, the disabled, the depressed, the ill and the elderly in the frontline. Suicide is not an assertion of personal autonomy, but an unnatural subversion of human dignity.