Protecting the Vulnerable

Until his dying day, Lord Falconer will be campaigning for assisted suicide. Until my dying day, I will be doing what I can to campaign against it.

We all know very well that the Church's position is firmly set against turning doctors sworn into their profession to be life-savers into state-sanctioned killers. We all understand that the morality of suicide at the hands of the State is a terrible idea that will inevitably lead to the untimely deaths of countless men, women and children, yet still a naive appeal to "compassion" cuts mustard with the UK population when this issue arises. What is hard for us to fathom is just how many people are at risk from being made to feel that suicide is the best option among a range of options that cannot bring ultimate 'closure' to pain and suffering in this life.

I have and continue to live a very privileged existence, but even within the context of this, there have been times in my life when I have found my life to be so mixed up and painful as to be 'intolerable'. Were assisted suicide legal in this country, would I have contemplated seeing a doctor to be 'put down' in the middle of a massive depression?

I can reel off a list of people who I personally know, or am in touch with, for whom 'assisted suicide' would become a very real and attractive proposal. There is a elderly lady I know who is cut off from her community entirely because she cannot go out due to mobility problems. There are homeless people I know who sleep in loading bays and car parks whose living conditions lack even the basics of sanitation and hygiene.

There are mentally ill people I know who would give anything to stop the 'voices' from talking to them that they do not want to hear. I know a man who has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and who, on the same day as he was diagnosed, heard that his dad had suffered a heart attack and died. I know people for whom every waking day is a search for money for heroin and crack - an existence which they themselves find embarrassing, degrading, but who feel unable to break out of the cycle of dependency. I know people who live in accommodation so appalling and rotten that they stay out on the street all day and all night until they are so tired that they know that when they go 'home' they will simply fall asleep. The vast majority of these people have, at one time or another, told me of their thoughts of 'ending it all'. Making that option easy will simply make that option more attractive. It sends out all the wrong signals, unless, of course, you want loads of people to die.

Yesterday, I was talking to a friend who takes another friend out for a breath of fresh air in her wheelchair. She lives alone and he often goes round to talk to her and listen to her. She has been sectioned many times. She is bipolar and talks to him regularly about suicidal thoughts. He often stays with her, talking to her for hours. Until now we have been telling people to 'seek help' if you are suicidal. Lord Falconers 'help' will eventually mean the 'help' that you need to request your own execution. The very ground upon which rest the lives of millions in this country will shift, an earthquake that could swallow men and women whole.

Assisted suicide will place over these people - and potentially over all of us - a governmental sword hanging by a thread that we can ourselves snip, and that is before we even talk of the Court of Protection and the secret courts that are able to judge on matters of life and death for those who 'lack capacity' to make informed choices for themselves.

Unlike Lord Falconer, I do not wish to see these vulnerable people, who struggle day in and day out to keep going in life, often heroically, often in extremely difficult situations, often in situations that many of us would deem 'intolerable' placed on an NHS mattress and executed at their own request.

To these people I can never be a saviour, but to these people I try with God's grace to be a brother and friend. Unlike Lord Falconer, I do not want any of them to give up hope, to despair and to turn to the Government to call down the sword of death upon themselves in their pain and humiliation. God is He who casts down the mighty and the proud and raises up the poor and the lowly. It will be the Government that esteems the proud, the self-sufficient and the rich, but tramples on the poor, offering the sick, the lame, the weak and needy nothing but their own end.

The time for the country and its parliamentarians to decide has come: Do you want your government to be your God or God to be your God for only one is worthy of the name. So many people are at risk from this bill, more than you can fathom. Do what you can to oppose this insidious bill. For a nation even to contemplate such a thing is a sure sign that a nation itself has lost the will to live - a nation and a people that has no faith, no hope, but only a conviction that the only duty that exists for us, is our duty to die when we are no longer or no longer feel, 'productive'.