By Democrat reporter
“Last week’s parliamentary votes to decriminalise abortion and to legislate for assisted dying opened up a fault line in British society so wide and deep that it is difficult to know how to bridge it,” the Catholic feminist theologian Tina Beattie writes in this week’s issue of The Tablet magazine.
She eloquently describes the tension between the disciplined search for the common good that is at the heart of the Church’s social teaching and “liberal concepts such as autonomy, freedom of choice and individual rights”.
When social cohesion frays under the pressure of growing economic inequalities and the existential anxieties of modern life, the articulate and the comfortable are naturally inclined to champion policies and laws that protect their own interests.
Under pressure, they will pursue a ruthless creed of autonomous individualism while hiding behind a mask of euphemisms about “compassion” and “rights”.
Tina’s outlook is bleak: “As the Catholic Church increasingly finds its voice as the defender of the sanctity of every human life, across the killing fields of war, poverty, disease, the death penalty, euthanasia and abortion, Britain is accelerating in the opposite direction. Catholics must still seek reasoned dialogue across the widening abyss – but the challenges are becoming immense.”
Julian Hughes, a specialist in the care of older patients, argues that if the provision of assisted suicide becomes one of the options a doctor can offer to their patient the relationship between them will be fundamentally tarnished for ever.
“Aristotle argued that the purpose and goal of the medical art is health. The same thought is contained in the founding of the NHS. But it’s no longer true.
“If the assisted dying bill becomes law, doctors will be able to take deliberate aim at the death of their patients. There will be consequences for all of us: for patients, for health care professionals and for society.”