(RNS) — Last week, the British Parliament voted to permit assisted suicide for citizens of England and Wales over the objections of a wide spectrum of religious leaders.
Signing a letter against the “assisted dying” bill were clergy from the country’s top Christian (Church of England, Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox), Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist and Zoroastrian traditions. “Our pastoral roles make us deeply concerned about the impact the bill would have on the most vulnerable, opening up the possibility of life-threating abuse and coercion,” the letter read.
Before he resigned last month, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby called the bill “dangerous.” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis declared it could “turn life into a commodity like any other.”
Nevertheless, 75% of the British public supports legalization of assisted suicide, with only 14% opposed, according to the latest polling data. Among self-identified Christians, support is running at 69%. Among the major British religious communities, only self-identified Muslims oppose legalization, 45% to 34%.
The gap between religious elites and the general public is hardly unique to Britain.
In the U.S., there’s a comparable phalanx of elite religious opponents of assisted suicide, broken only by the liberal United Church of Christ and Unitarian Universalist denominations, both of which support a right of self-determination in dying. Also comparably, according to Gallup, 71% of the American public supports allowing doctors to end a patient’s life by painless means (euthanasia), while 66% support allowing doctors to assist patients in committing suicide.
To be sure, Americans are not equally comfortable with the morality of doctor-assisted suicide, with just 53% saying it’s morally acceptable versus 40% saying it’s morally wrong. Where a small plurality of self-identified Christians consider it wrong, 77% of those with no religious affiliation consider it acceptable.
Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the level of support for legal euthanasia and assisted suicide has not been noticeably affected by the remarkable rise in disengagement from organized religion. Since Oregon became the first state to legalize assisted suicide in 1994, the religiously unaffiliated, also known as the nones, have quadrupled to nearly a third of the U.S. population. Yet a generation later the practices are only legal in nine other states, plus the District of Columbia.
So if the rise of the nones does not explain why religious leaders are out of step with public opinion on end-of-life matters, what does?
It does not seem coincidental that support for legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide in the general public flipped from 37% in 1947, when Gallup first asked about euthanasia, to 53% in 1973, when it next polled on the issue. This shift occurred just as a range of life-extending medical techniques such as mechanical ventilation were introduced. It’s likely that it’s precisely this increased ability to keep people alive — sometimes regardless of their wishes — that led to increased support for euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Meanwhile, religious elites remained tied to their long-standing condemnations of suicide. These range from Catholicism, which considers suicide equivalent to murder, to Buddhism, for which it is a harmful action that only leads to another form of suffering.
In addition, as the British religious leaders’ letter suggests, there is among those who advocate for the most vulnerable a drumbeat of concern that society will euthanize those it considers too unproductive and expensive to keep alive. The increase in the number of assisted deaths where it’s been legalized, some argue, shows we’re already on a slippery slope in that direction.
Whether we are in fact on such a slope is far from clear. The most vulnerable patients are those suffering from dementia, and they constitute only a tiny percentage of those who die by either euthanasia or assisted suicide. By far the largest proportion of such deaths — over 60% — occur among cancer patients. They tend to be aware enough of what their disease holds in store for them and they want no part of it.
Those whose religious commitments compel them to oppose assisted death urge high-quality palliative care as the remedy. But, as a recent survey of the field puts it, “even the best available palliative care is not able to prevent a significant minority of patients from dying without unbearable pain.”
Bernice Silk (1927-2011)
The best way to lower rates of euthanasia and assisted suicide, in other words, would be to cure cancer.
When my then-83-year-old mother experienced a recurrence of peritoneal cancer, she knew what was coming and decided she’d had enough. After consulting with her internist, she stopped eating. Over the next two weeks she planned her funeral, gave instructions to her children and grandchildren, answered questions about her past and said goodbye.
After two weeks, she passed into a coma, and then passed away. Hers was not, technically, an assisted suicide, but it was a suicide and we assisted her to the end. The Catholic hospice agency was troubled by it. It was, by my lights, the best of deaths.