At present, we are looking at the fact that the logic of assisted suicide, sometimes called medical assistance in dying, is spreading, and it’s spreading all over the world. Most recently, the headlines have come from the United Kingdom, from Britain, where a measure to legalize assisted suicide failed. Now, it failed just a matter of barely a year ago. It failed in the House of Lords having passed in one sense through the House of Commons. 

But what happened just in recent days is that in the UK, both Houses failed to move forward with the legislation. But that is not to say that a majority of the members of parliament have indicated they want to pass some kind of medical assistance in dying or assisted suicide bill.

The fact is that this particular bill just showed up with so many problems that even the advocates for assisted suicide, eventually many of them could not sign onto the legislation, so it failed. You have very interesting headlines coming out, and at least some of these headlines have to do with people who were known to be advocates for assisted suicide who’ve now come out and said, “This is why I voted against the bill.”

Now, one of the clear issues of warning, and this is not just about this bill in the United Kingdom, it’s about any bill that legalizes assisted suicide, any policy that legalizes assisted suicide, one of the things you have to watch is that there is a complete transfer, a complete exchange of the moral imperative that is implied in the policy. Over the course of the last several, well, thousands of years, millennia, the practice of medicine has been predicated upon the principle of the Hippocratic Oath, first, do no harm. The physician is to be an agent of life, not an agent of death. 

But once you come up with physician-assisted suicide or so-called medical assistance in dying, that’s a euphemism that hides the reality or attempts to with milder, innocuous language, the reality is that it turns medical professionals into those who are agents of death rather than agents of healing. Now, by the way, agents of healing do understand the reality of death, but death is understood to be the enemy, not something to be embraced.

When you look at the legislation that failed just recently in Great Britain, there are some warning signs that really should have our attention. For example, when you look at the application of the assisted suicide, and when you look at the principle, the policies that were going to be put into place, it would cover diagnoses that are by no rational definition even terminal diagnoses. One of the things we need to watch is how the logic of assisted suicide works.

It begins with people saying, “Look, there are people who are in the active phase of dying. They are suffering. There is pain. There is discomfort. They want release.” And so that is where most of the assisted suicide legislation began with people who are clearly in the last stages of life. They are in the process of dying, and this is to bring about what was defined as a dignified death or death with dignity, that was not just a prolonged process that was supposedly lacking in dignity. And by the way, death is not always accompanied by anything that would be described as dignity. That’s one of the reasons why biblically it is defined as the enemy. The enemy does not grant dignity. 

But the Christian gospel does grant dignity, and that dignity is a dignity that even extends to the body. But when you look at the entire logic of assisted suicide, you are looking at so many moral transformations.

Now, it was very interesting to see response on both sides of the Atlantic to the fact that the legislation in Britain failed. Now, Britain is currently under a Labour government, so that’s a left-of-center government. According to most indications, there is a majority in Parliament, which includes not only the Labor Party, but many in the Conservative Party who are for some form of physician-assisted suicide.

Now, that’s bad news, that’s a very ominous development, but that is interesting in this background because evidently there are a sufficient number, we are told, of parliamentarians in both of the Houses, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, to move forward with this legislation, but it didn’t happen. And there are a couple reasons why. 

Number one, it was what’s known as a private member’s bill. And so it was not coming as a party project. So the Labour Party, which is in control, Labour Prime Minister, that party did not come with this proposal, this legislation. Instead, it was a private member’s bill. That meant that it didn’t go through the party process. And that’s at least why some people are saying on the Labour side, they didn’t vote for the legislation because there would have been more forethought, more care put into the legislation if the party itself sponsored it.

The situation in this case was so strange that the Prime Minister, who’s the Head of the Labor Party, Andy Burnham, actually released the party members to vote regardless of their party affiliation. He did not call for a straight up or down party vote. And when you look at that, that meant that he was also creating some distance between himself and his party and this bill.

Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review wrote a very interesting piece published in The Washington Post. The headline is “Britain Assisted Suicide Bill Fails Again.” And he goes on to say what’s obvious, and that is the debate is sure to come back, “Because the proposal’s proponents invoke two powerful values, compassion and liberty.” Now, I might put it a little bit differently. I would say compassion and autonomy, because those are the two moral goods that the assisted suicide movement claims to represent. They say they’re on the side of compassion towards those who are dying and they’re on the side of personal autonomy or liberty. That means you get to decide your own fate. Period. 

I think Ponnuru actually describes the situation very well: “The debate is sure to come back because the proposal’s proponents invoked two powerful values, compassion and liberty. They say the health system should give those who are in the final six months of their lives the option to end their suffering. Many opponents, on the other hand, consider it wrong in principle for the government to designate any subset of the population as having lives not worth living. They were joined by some who support assisted suicide in theory, but believe that in practice, a new policy would constrict other options, pushing the most vulnerable members of society to their deaths. Among the opponents of the bill,” to whom Ponnuru spoke, “that was the dominant worry that in the name of freedom, I would say again, autonomy, patients in dire circumstances would not just be assisted, but encouraged to die.” Okay. I think that is a brilliant paragraph.

I think it sets the issue with extreme clarity. I think it’s very interesting that that particular article was run in The Washington Post because that means that even a newspaper like The Washington Post does recognize this is a very significant moral issue. And when you look at the medical assistance in dying, MAID is how it’s often presented as an acronym, or assisted suicide, you’ll notice that the language being used by the proponents is we’re doing this out of compassion.

We’re doing this because persons ought to have the liberty, ought to have the autonomy to define their own lives, to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable. Now, let me just stop there for a moment and say that is profoundly counter to the biblical worldview. The biblical worldview does not say that we have any such autonomy at all. We are not the creator.

We’re not the one who declared life and we’re not the one who should declare death. That is to be something that is done by others. It is God who gives life and we have no right to declare ourselves the master of life and death. By the way, that personal autonomy argument, just one obvious fact, there’s not a single human being who exists because of his or her personal autonomy. We did not decide to be conceived and to be born. That was outside our control. It is a given. That’s very clear. That’s very central to the Christian worldview, but the Christian worldview speaks about death in the same basic way. It is not to be something that we seek to bring under our control. 

Okay, now there are many people who said, many members of parliament who said they would vote for a bill. They just didn’t vote for this bill because of what they saw as particular problems.

And one of the big problems is what’s described as a lack of safeguards. Okay, now this gets really interesting. Safeguards for bringing about death. Just let that irony sit with you for a moment. Listen to this. “The lack of safeguards reflected its supporters’ expansive views of when suicide makes sense. Charles Falconer, one of the bill’s leading sponsors in the House of Lords, has argued that ‘pregnancy should not be a bar to the procedure.'” Wait just a minute. You would think that when someone talks about a woman who’s pregnant, or I guess in the updated parlance of the Progressives, “a person who is pregnant,” you would think that being pregnant would be a morally significant category. But in this case, this legislator, one of the leading sponsors in the House of Lords, said, “No, it would not be a bar.” 

I quote from the article again. “Pressed on the possibility that poor people might choose suicide, unaware of the financial support they could receive, he was unfazed. Your financial position might be an element in what makes you reach a decision.” I just want you to notice how far this movement has gone. This movement has gone from saying that human beings out of dignity and autonomy ought to have some kind of control over the circumstances of their own death so that they are not robbed of autonomy and they’re not robbed of dignity.

And that should be after the point in which there’s a clear terminal diagnosis and no one doubts that death is on the horizon. They move from that to extending the logic to not only an imminent death by a terminal disease, but what they consider to be unacceptable suffering. And sometimes they use categories like intolerable or some other phrase about suffering. But the bottom line is that once again, that is a subjective determination.

And it also says to people who are in chronic situations, a chronic disease, chronic needs for medical care, “You are a burden on the entire society. You just need to exercise your autonomy and get out of the way.” And this is something, by the way, that’s very, very tangible just in terms of how families often are going to have to deal with this thing. Can we afford for this person to live much longer or is that simply going to consume too many financial resources?

That’s a calculation that should not be a part of the picture. Christians understand that calculation should not be a thing, but it is and it’s going to be even more of a thing when this logic moves forward. Okay. You also have a situation in which there is a logic that those who are even looking at say a terminal diagnosis should just, well, leap to this conclusion and go ahead with this procedure early before you even start down the road of that kind of treatment.

But then they move in terms of age. It’s not just those who are clearly adults in the end stage, terminal stage of disease, and then to something which is before that in their personal autonomy. But then they say, well, if it’s something that ought to be the right of someone who’s an adult, then how can you say to teenagers and to children, they do not have access to the same right? And especially when at first they’ll claim it’s only for individuals regardless of age when they face an actual terminal diagnosis and they’re in the last months of that terminal phase, but then you all of a sudden say, well, if personal autonomy is the thing, then why shouldn’t a 14-year-old be able to say in his or her personal autonomy, this is an unacceptable level of suffering?

You also have other things, and this is what’s now taking place in many jurisdictions where the original argument was final stage of life, terminal diagnosis, impending death, and then it comes down to unacceptable mental suffering. It’s not just physical suffering, it’s emotional suffering. And we have talked on The Briefing about front page news in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, so both Europe and the United States, Canada, of course, is a big player in this, saying that this is a way out for those who are really in what they just define themselves as unacceptable mental suffering.

And sometimes, by the way, that doesn’t even have to be with any kind of diagnosis. That tells you how the logic works. Okay, so as you’re looking at Canada, let’s think about something. As you think about Canada right now, by some estimations, assisted suicide ranks in the top five causes of death in Canada. And even Ponnuru in this says that it takes the lives in Canada of 45 people a day. That’s 45 people in one country a day by assisted suicide.

And that was in the year 2024. It is expected that the numbers have gone up even higher from that. All right, looking at the United States, you look at how many states now have legalized assisted suicide. It’s a minority of the states. You’re talking right now about 13 states in the District of Columbia, but you’ll also notice that as these states adopt assisted suicide, they always say they’re doing this in the name of compassion.

They’re doing this in the name of personal autonomy and human rights. And then they’ll say, “We’re not going to allow that to happen,” in terms of some scenario. And the next thing you know, that’s exactly what’s happening. 

The British situation is so interesting. There’s a lot we could talk about here, but I do want to take us back across the Atlantic, come to the United States and go to the state of New York where in just a matter of the last several months, assisted suicide has become legal.

And that means The New York Times is right there at ground zero. So here’s a full page article in the print edition from Sunday, the headline, “The Start-Up That Helps People Die.” Okay, start-up, we’re kind of used to that terminology. In a corporate world, that means this is a new business. This is a new start-up. The subhead, “Clinical Professionals Unite to Assist Clients who Want to Receive Medical Aid in Dying.”

Emma Goldberg is the reporter. The article tells us about Dr. Tara Shapiro, whose mother-in-law, by the way, had gone to Vermont in order to receive medical assistance in dying or assisted suicide. Dr. Tara Shapiro is now responding to the situation with the legalization of assisted suicide in the state of New York by creating what amounts to a, well, assisted death practice or just even a industry group, professional organization.

Listen to this. “After three decades of working in hospitals, what did it mean to go from fighting off death to speeding it up? What did this mean in terms of the Hippocratic Oath that ancient and often misquoted text meant to guide the profession with its subtle command to give no deadly medicine?” Listen to this. “Dr. Shapiro has been wrestling with these questions. New York State has just made legal the practice known as physician-assisted suicide. Those in the field preferred the gentler medical aid in dying or MAID. Since around February, Dr. Shapiro has been working with a group of doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other clinicians to create what is believed to be the state’s first practice devoted to helping patients die on their own terms. It opened August the 5th, the first day that medical aid in dying was legal in the state. It didn’t have an office, we’re told, because the team will treat patients at their homes. ‘You can think of it as a start-up for better deaths.’”

Now, we’re not talking about something in some nation far away. We’re talking about New York State right here in the United States of America. We’re also talking, of course, about a situation that is closely observed in Canada where already there has been such an expansion of assisted death. There’s been such an expansion of the entire movement of assisted suicide.

There’s been an expansion of the categories down to the fact that the nation’s highest court has said that it’s going to have to be justified on the basis of psychological, emotional, or mental conditions as well. And so you look at all this and you can just see it’s like something that starts here and expands and expands and expands. Christians understand this because the logic of death is consuming. The logic of death is spreading. It just always does.

You say death here, and the next thing you know, you’re saying death there. You’re saying this category. The next thing you’re saying the other category. You say we would never talk about children and teenagers. The next thing you know, the law is talking about children and teenagers. Now, the other worldview issue we need to see here is how people turn reality upside down. Dr. Shapiro gives us an incredible example of that.

I mentioned the Hippocratic Oath, “first, do no harm and you shall not give anyone a deadly medicine.” But then listen to this, “The Hippocratic Oath says, do no harm, Dr. Shapiro said, and I don’t think we’re harming anyone by doing this. I think we’re actually being compassionate and relieving suffering.” So here you have a complete redefinition of medical ethics and you turn what was condemned in ancient medicine and throughout the last several centuries in millennia, just very clearly, physicians are to be agents of healing, not agents of death.

And then you have a doctor who obviously has many colleagues who share the same conviction, “I don’t think we’re harming anyone by doing this.” Remember, they’re bringing about death. I think we’re actually being compassionate and relieving suffering. There you see the reversal, an entire moral universe turned upside down. This start-up, that’s how it’s described here, this start-up is called Quiĕtus and we’re told that it comprises “an eclectic crew of nine clinical professionals.”

One is the doctor and then there is also a hospice social worker who used to be a Buddhist monk. And then there’s a palliative care doctor who also treats trauma patients with ketamine therapy. And then there is the leader, “a soft-spoken nurse practitioner who treats chronic pain and dreamed of creating this practice after treating aging patients who asked to be put out of their misery.”

I think the most important issue for Christians, is to recognize that this is the direct rejection of virtually the entirety of the biblical worldview. Let’s go back to that statement that was offered by Ramesh Ponnuru when he said it all comes down to the claim that this is done in the name of compassion and liberty, or as I would say, compassion and autonomy. And thus you notice that using those two categories, they just reverse everything that came before.

Even when you go back as far as the Hippocratic Oath and it says, give no lethal drug, that was considered to be the direct denial of the responsibility of a physician to heal. Now you have people turn around and say, “I think we need to look at that again. I think we need to turn all of that around.” And that’s a logic, by the way, I just want to remind you, will not stop with voluntary assisted suicide. It will end with some form of involuntary death.

And by the way, I think there’s plenty of evidence for that in some of the warnings that came in the parliamentary debate there in London. It had to do with the fact that what shifts very quickly is what’s first defined as a right to die to what then becomes a duty to die.

Along similar lines, I want to change to talk about recent statements made by Kenneth R. Feinberg, and he also wrote a book published first several years ago. It’s just come out with a new edition.

The book asked the title, What Is Life Worth? Now, if you recognize the name Kenneth R. Feinberg, it is because he was the single individual who has made the Special Master of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Now, here’s an astounding reality. After the horrifying day of September 11th, 2001, in just a matter of days, Congress passed legislation adopting a Victim’s Compensation Fund, and we’re talking about thousands of victims. Just keep this in mind.

And the fund was to be used to bring about some justice, some healing, some compensation for the families of those left behind. Now, remember, if you just take the Twin Towers, think about how many of the men in that building were fathers? How many of the women in that building were mothers and sisters? And the fact is that there were many families that were absolutely devastated by the loss of a parent. And in some cases, far beyond that.

But what Congress intended by this fund was to try to come up with a system whereby the thousands of victims, their families and dependents and all the rest, could have a process through which they could go, for access to a fund established by Congress, which by the way, didn’t have a particular financial limit on it, rather than all the individuals and individual families to go to the courts. It would’ve been an impossible situation. It would’ve been an administrative nightmare. And furthermore, it would’ve been something that would’ve bankrupted a lot of the United States. 

And people don’t think about this, but when you look at the reality of 9/11 and you look at the fact that airlines were involved and airliners were involved, then suing those airlines, and for that matter, suing even other airlines and suing people connected with the airports and all the rest, it would bankrupt the airlines. It would probably be a damage to the American economy and American society that Congress just could not accept. And so they put this together. 

Now, what’s interesting in this is that there is virtually nothing else in American history that is an analogy. In other words, the Congress hasn’t done anything similar in other cases, even in cases of terrorism like Oklahoma City or anything like that. This didn’t happen. This happened because of the scale of 9/11. Kenneth R. Feinberg is an attorney. He had been a counsel for Senator Edward Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, obviously a man very much identified as a Liberal Democrat. But remember that at this point, George W. Bush is President of the United States. And at this point, John Ashcroft is the Attorney General of the United States.

And even as Congress authorized the President and specifically the Attorney General to name the Special Master, they wanted to be very clear in this context, and I think this was smart, they wanted to be very clear that this was not a partisan issue. So they actually hired someone on the recommendation of Senator Edward Kennedy. And so that removed any possibility that there would be the accusation this was a politicized appointment. And it also has to do with the fact that Kenneth R. Feinberg, as an attorney, had a background in dealing with a lot of these issues, all kinds of things, environmental damage and chemical agents and all the rest, trying to allocate funds in this kind of what in most cases was a lawsuit, in this case, a congressionally authorized fund. 

But he did have a background, but that background was just tiny compared to the challenge that was handed him just days after the 9/11 attacks. Now, I mention this because it’s right after we looked at the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and it also raises the question. He wrote a book after this experience, and he admits it was a pretty horrifying experience being the Special Master. And he writes about how they came to the conclusion of how they would handle this. And the title of this book is “What Is Life Worth?” Now, that’s an interesting question. Let’s just think for a moment.

If you’re going to answer that question in purely secular terms, you’re going to have a grave challenge. And as a matter of fact, you’re not going to come up with any right answer. But when it came to this situation, Feinberg and his team came up with the fact that looking at this large a number of victims, victim families and all the rest, they would have to figure out basically on the basis of the income of the person who was killed in the terror attack, what would be the financial impact on a family.

And so the average payout, so to speak, was under $2 million, but some went up basically around four or a little over four. But you look at Feinberg’s book and he says, “Look, a lot of people just said that’s not fair.” There were people earning millions of dollars a year and their family said, “You should be compensating us for millions of dollars.” There were other people who were working at far lesser paid occupations, let’s just say, or jobs. And the payout for them, is it going to be based on their hourly pay? No, it was based upon a calculation.

My purpose in raising this is neither to affirm nor criticize the methodology that Kenneth R. Feinberg put in place. It is just to recognize that he did ask the right question, What Is Life Worth? And I just want to underline the fact that this many days after the 25th anniversary of 9/11, it’s a good reminder to us that even as there was a financial payout to compensate these families, it cannot compensate at all for the loss of a father, of a husband or a family member or a son or a daughter.

You just go down the list. It’s not possible. And that underlines the fact that life is absolutely precious. And I think this is exactly the kind of question that is helpful in focusing once again on what we were just talking about with physician-assisted suicide and all the rest. You know what? It turns out that there are people trying to answer this question, What Is Life Worth, on their own terms. And that is exactly what I think Christians know we must not do.

Feinberg asked the question, What Is Life Worth? He tells us, “Claimants demanded more money because of the victim’s intrinsic moral worth since the husband and father were the perfect family man, since the wife and mother had sacrificed so much for the family, since the brother or sister was the glue that kept the family together. More was lost and therefore more was needed to compensate for the loss.”

He goes on, “Unfortunately, many 9/11 families came to believe that the fund was attempting to place a dollar value on the life of the victim. It took years,” he writes, “to disabuse families of this notion. The fund was not valuing the moral worth of those murdered on 9/11. I affirm this,” he says, “whenever I met publicly with families or community meetings or privately with a particular claimant. Instead,” he says, “I emphasize the requirement of need, which was linked directly to financial circumstances.”

So let’s go back to the title of the book, What Is Life Worth? You take him at his word on page 154, he says, “More or less, we were unable to answer that question.” Now, it’s also interesting, very interesting that at the beginning of the book, Kenneth R. Feinberg says he was trying to find wisdom and he turned to religious sources, to Christianity and Judaism and other world philosophies just trying to figure out how to think this through.

But at the end of the book, he writes this, and I want you to hear it, “On a personal level, I’ve undoubtedly become much more fatalistic about life and death. Whoever is pulling the strings, whatever cosmic force is making the call, it’s clear to me that life and death can turn on the most innocuous events, requesting a second cup of coffee at a local diner, a 10-minute delay that miraculously prevents you from being trapped in your office in the World Trade Center. Accompanying your child to school one day, which prevents you from being at your desk in the Pentagon when the plane hits. Surviving the destruction of the World Trade Center by sheer luck while your fellow rescue worker standing next to you become part of the fatality count.” He says, “The random nature of who lives and who dies was a common thread throughout the life of the 9/11 fund.”

I want to tell you that it’s kind of heartbreaking just to read those words, but I can understand in the excruciating situation of administering this fund, if you do not have a really firm biblical worldview, then you’re going to have to come to some conclusion. And I guess the reason I’m bringing this up is to say those are really the only two alternatives. Either it is just a matter of luck or there is a sovereign God in control of the universe.

If Christianity isn’t true and Jesus Christ isn’t Lord, then I believe the worldview that is represented in that statement is pretty much all that’s left. As Christians, sometimes the best answer we can give is just the gospel. You ask the question, What Is Life Worth? I want to suggest to you the right answer. “For God so loveth the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have everlasting life.”

I think in light of that question, that’s where Christians have to start.