LAURA DODSWORTH

In a historic vote, the House of Commons has turned its back on the sanctity of life. By 330 votes to 275, MPs have approved draft legislation that allows terminally ill adults, expected to die within six months, to seek help to end their lives.

Palliative care consultant Dr Dominic Whitehouse begged MPs to vote with ‘wisdom and courage’. They did not. A 55-vote majority has declared that life is cheap.

Let us be clear: this is not ‘assisted dying’. That phrase belongs to the noble art of palliative care, which cherishes life even in its final moments. This is assisted suicide—a deliberate act to extinguish life. It is a seismic shift that should alarm anyone who values the moral fabric of our society.

History and modern examples alike offer lessons we are too blind or arrogant to heed. Take Oregon, often cited as a exemplary model for assisted suicide due to its so-called ‘Death with Dignity Act’. Oregon’s journey should give us pause. In 1998, just 16 assisted deaths were recorded; by 2022, that number had soared to 278. Over time, trends emerged that reveal the cost of this policy, not in pounds but in humanity.

Patients’ funding shifted from predominantly private to mostly state-funded healthcare (65% private in 1998; 79.5% government-supported in 2022). More patients reported feeling like a burden or struggling with financial worries as reasons for choosing death. Relationships between doctors and patients became transactional — shrinking from 18 weeks in 2010 to just five weeks in 2022. Psychiatric evaluations, designed to protect those in vulnerable states, remained astonishingly rare, hovering at just 1%.

What is dignified about this conveyor belt to death?

And Oregon has taken things one step further. It is one of the places in the world where people can opt for aquamation, a chemical process that reduces human remains to liquid and bone fragments, marketed as ‘soil transformation’. Once complete, the liquefied remains can be used as fertiliser. Of course, we all become soil in the end. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But our rituals are sacralised and respectful, they give time not just for the body but for the mourners. This haste is soulless, clinical and dehumanising. And note it is not human transformation but soil transformation. The human is lost — the humanity is lost.

Societies that treat life as disposable are doomed to collapse. We have seen it before. Under the Soviet regime and Mao’s China, life was cheapened to the point of irrelevance. Individuals were sacrificed to ideology; human worth was measured by utility to the state. Millions perished as the machinery of death rolled on.

It is easy to dismiss these as extreme examples, but the seeds of such devaluation are sown when we begin to tamper with the inviolability of life. Legalising assisted suicide in Britain invites us to tread the same path. We assure ourselves it will be different here, that we are more compassionate, more advanced. But compassion twisted into expedience is no longer compassion. It is abandonment.

Today’s vote marks a death knell for civilisation

But the bells have been ringing for decades. Today, they are deafening.

We are a society rotting from within. Girls are told they can become boys, and boys are told they can become girls, as if biological reality is an inconvenience to be rewritten. Pensioners are denied their winter fuel allowance despite knowing that thousands will perish from the cold. In our streets, metropolitan elites wrapped in keffiyas chant for intifada on their own streets while ignoring their own moral hypocrisies. Ours is a culture of contradiction and decay.

We worry about barbarians at the gates, but the real rot is internal. Our civilisation is riddled with maggots. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: we are the maggots, gnawing away at the decaying flesh of our own culture.

‘Assisted dying’ is dressed up in the language of autonomy and choice, but the underlying message is clear: you are not worth saving. Britain is becoming a death cult, which can only happen when life is cheap.

True dignity lies in care, love, and support, even when the path is difficult. True compassion requires us to stand firm in the face of suffering, not to eliminate the sufferer. When we legalise assisted suicide, we do not affirm life — we betray it.

This vote is a tragedy — not just for those who will be affected by the legislation, but for our society as a whole. We are told this is progress, but it is a step into darkness and decay. Legalising assisted suicide doesn’t just end lives; it erodes the very foundations of civilisation.

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This article (A Death Knell for Civilisation: Today’s vote is a dark day for Britain.) was created and published by Laura Dodsworth and is republished here under “Fair Use” 

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