The cynical politics (and politicians) endorsing assisted dying and abortion

The Catholic Herald • April 14, 2024 at 11:00 am

This is a bleak time to be pro-life. The holistic vision of human life from conception to natural death as being invested with dignity and worthy of respect is being steadily undermined by legislatures.

In Britain and Ireland, there are moves to introduce assisted dying into law. An Irish parliamentary inquiry has recommended legislation to allow people with incurable terminal illnesses to be assisted to end their lives if their predicted life expectancy is from six to 12 months. In Britain, a celebrity campaigner, Dame Esther Rantzen, has led moves to introduce assisted dying in parliament, and the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer – the probable next prime minister – has promised to provide parliamentary time for legislation and to back it himself.

At the other end of the spectrum, a dominant theme of the US elections is abortion. President Biden, although a Catholic, subscribes to the intolerant pro-choice orthodoxy of his party and is backed by the Planned Parenthood Federation. Indeed, the most glaring gap in US politics is the absence of a coherent pro-life Democrat movement which would be genuinely compassionate and inclusive. Following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, as Nick Wapshott writes in the April edition of the Catholic Herald magazine, the matter is now for individual states to decide, and in those states where abortion provision is in dispute, many voters have punished pro-life Republicans.

In Alabama, the Supreme Court has ruled that embryos, including those created in IVF procedures, are to be treated with the same respect as babies. This is an assertion of the humanity of embryos, given they are often treated as disposable commodities by IVF practitioners through the routine creation of spare embryos. Yet Donald Trump, who as president appointed judges sympathetic to the prolife movement, has now called on the court to protect IVF provision, notwithstanding its modus operandi.

In Britain, there is now a bid in the House of Commons to decriminalise abortion late in pregnancy by removing offences that make it illegal for a woman to perform a self-administered abortion outside the current legal limit of 24 weeks’ gestation; this amendment to the Criminal Justice Act would apply up to birth. It comes after women were put on trial for illegal abortions after 24 weeks’ gestation. This in turn was a predictable result of permitting abortion providers to prescribe abortifacients by post, without a face-to-face consultation. Some women either misled providers about their stage of pregnancy, or did not know themselves.

The obvious response should be to reinstate the requirement for medics to see woman seeking abortifacients; instead, sanctions against third-trimester abortions (except for disability, where it is, unbelievably, legal up to birth) may be removed. This is prenatal infanticide.

In Ireland, the number of abortions carried out in the Republic has reached 10,000 in a year. The figure refutes the case made by pro-choice advocates during the abortion referendum of 2018 that abortion would be for crisis pregnancies and cases where the foetus could not survive outside the womb. In fact, abortion is being used in Ireland, as elsewhere, for convenience. Yet again we find that if abortion if freely available, more women will have recourse to it.

In France, matters are still worse now that President Emmanuel Macron has enshrined a right to abortion in the constitution itself. The values of the Republic – liberty, equality, fraternity – are tainted by association with the very unfraternal right to kill prenatal citizens. As Gavin Mortimer has noted, the president is seeking the approval of liberals, but in doing so he alienates a substantial constituency of Catholics and supporters of prenatal rights who find the move repugnant.

Yet the defence of innocent human life is a good cause. We know, as previous generations did not, that human life is a continuum from conception to natural death. And yet the dispiriting reality is that we have framed the rights of women in terms of the right to kill a foetus.

As for assisted dying, in most countries where it is legal it was originally restricted to some extent, but as with abortion, the provision expanded very quickly to include categories never envisaged at the outset. So, in the Netherlands, people with dementia who cannot give informed consent can be euthanised; so can people with depression. In Canada, assisted dying was extended from terminal conditions to mental illness.

By contrast, the Catholic position sets a premium on the relief of suffering and the provision of palliative care and hospices over the cheap option of assisted dying, and for women in crisis pregnancies, moral and practical support. Catholics do not regard any life as worthless, whether prenatal, or old, or frail. We know that choices originally framed to enhance individual autonomy end up falling hardest on the most vulnerable. These principles are worth fighting for.

Photo: Newborn Natasha Donnell with her mother during a counterprotest at an International Women’s Day abortion rights demonstration at the Texas State Capitol, Austin, Texas, 8 March 2023. Abortion rights activists gathered during International Women’s Day, advocating for access to legal abortion across all 50 states. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.)

This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click here.