The culture of death loses one—for the moment

Good news not being thick on the ground these days, I’m delighted to note some very good news from the mother country: on April 24, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill failed to gain passage in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, thus ending, for now, the efforts to legalize assisted suicide in England and Wales. A month earlier, the Scottish Parliament, by a vote of 69-57, also rejected an “assisted dying” bill. For the moment, then, the culture of death, against which John Paul II cautioned in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), has suffered a major setback.

The struggle, however, is far from over.

When I first wrote about it last October, the defeat of the assisted dying bill in the Westminster Parliament seemed unlikely. In June 2025, the bill had passed the House of Commons by 314-291 and passage through the Lords seemed likely. But unlike legislative procedure in the Commons, proposed legislative amendments in the Lords must be thoroughly debated. Hundreds of amendments were proposed and the parliamentary clock finally ran out on the bill. Those amendments reflected an intense lobbying campaign by pro-life organizations and effective parliamentary work by members of the British upper house like Lord Alton of Liverpool and Lord Moore of Etchingham.

As David Alton wrote me in response to an email of congratulations, “the [House of Lords] scrutiny and especially the recent vote in the Scottish Parliament against euthanasia legislation has been an incredibly important moment. They demonstrated that, when proper consideration is given to the ethical and practical concerns, we can sometimes have the courage to defy the zeitgeist.” Charles Moore, in response to the same e-mail, told me that “the other side overreached,” but warned that “they’ll be back.”

Lord Alton did not disagree: “[Chesterton] observed, after the defeat of…[the] 1913 Mental Deficiency Bill to sterilise those classified as ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘moral defectives’ [that] ‘the dazed dupes will be back again.’”

As they undoubtedly will. A proponent of the Scottish assisted dying bill, Liam McArthur, described its defeat as “unforgivable,” charging the bill’s opponents with having raised false fears; the bill, he claimed, was “tightly drawn” and “heavily safeguarded.” Similar guarantees were offered by Sandesh Gulhane, another Scottish parliamentarian and himself a doctor, who claimed that it was a “good bill, a sound bill” that offered “compassion, safeguards, and dignity for those facing the end of life.” Mr. McArthur and Dr. Gulhane were evidently unfamiliar with the maxim, widely attested by recent history, that when the formerly impermissible becomes permissible, it will sooner or later seem mandatory—the compassionate thing to do.

That has certainly been the case in Canada, for in the True North Strong and Free, pressures on patients to agree to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) are such that, as my colleague Carl Trueman recently observed, “Euthanasia now accounts for approximately one in twenty deaths in Canada. The government has now killed almost as many Canadian citizens as were slaughtered by the forces of the Kaiser and then of Hitler in the First and Second World Wars combined.”

In 2021, MAiD was the fifth most common cause of death in Canada—a fact obscured (deliberately?) by the Canadian government, whose statistical service does not “code” MAiD deaths as such but by the deceased’s underlying condition. The Canadian assisted dying program has corrupted the medical professions and coarsened family relations, as described in a horrific, clarifying article published in 2024 in the London-based Spectator. But surely there is enough corruption and coarsening in 21st-century culture without turning the arts of healing into the arts of death-dealing.

Dr. Gulhane, the Scottish parliamentary enthusiast for assisted dying, told the Guardian that “Choice matters.” But as ever, advocates of the culture of death never finish the sentence: Choose what?

The object of our choosing is what invests that choosing with dignity, or, conversely, degrades us. Choice untethered from reason and virtue is childish willfulness. Choice as an expression of my “autonomy” is the worship of the false god of the imperial self: the god of Me, Myself, and I. And the worship of false gods never conduces to personal happiness or social solidarity.

So full marks to David Alton, Charles Moore, and the pro-life advocacy groups who fought and won the good fight in the House of Lords. But let’s not forget Lord Alton’s warning: “Eugenics, and the death wish, will keep coming back.” Legislative vigilance is thus essential. So is building the culture of life by expanding access to palliative end-of-life care.