One hundered years ago, suicide was illegal. Homosexuality was illegal. Casting a vote as a woman was illegal.
Today, these things are not merely allowed, but considered to be rights.
A significant factor in the decision to legalise them was public pressure. Enough people felt them to be oppressive or absurd that the lawmakers came to agree, and the laws were changed.
We are seeing a parallel issue today. There is a growing body of opinion arguing for the laws surrounding euthanasia and assisted suicide to be reconsidered, not by eminent doctors, or by high court judges, or by our elected leaders, but only in the ‘court of public opinion’.
These are emotive issues, it is argued, and they cannot be dealt with coldly and clinically by those who have never been through the trauma of seeing a loved one die slowly and painfully.
One the one hand, this sounds eminently sensible. The laws are made for the public good, why shouldn’t the public decide what should and shouldn’t be legal?
Firstly, emotion clouds judgement, and emotive issues are by nature very subjective. John Humphrys, in his recent book The Welcome Visitor, describes the lingering death of his father, and concludes that such suffering and indignity should not have been allowed, asking himself “Should we [his children], in one way or another, have helped him end it?”
George Pitcher, on the other hand, in a recent Daily Telegraph column described the equally distressing death of his mother, but reached the opposite conclusion:
“I begged [the nurse], in tears, for this pointless suffering to end. [She] was lovely: patient and kind, but firm. No, she said, she couldn't do that, but she held my hand and said that all would be well soon ... She was right, of course. I shiver when I think of what I would have lost, had the medical profession not saved me from myself.”
Such stories serve to demonstrate that the hour of your greatest suffering, or of your witnessing a loved-one’s suffering, is the one hour at which you should be neither forced nor expected to make rational decisions about end-of-life care. In the same way that mothers are not allowed to negotiate with the kidnappers of their sons, or fathers to mete out justice to the rapists of their daughters, this situation is so charged with emotion that it must, surely, be left to an impartial observer to adjudicate.
Secondly, it is vital to recognise that this ‘public’ in whose opinion so much trust is being placed, is terrifyingly fickle and easy to manipulate. Far from being a solid rock of considered thought, public opinion is a shifting sand, unstable and moved by emotional appeals. This is the same public whose assessment of reality TV personality Jade Goody changed from ‘public enemy number one’ in 2002, to ‘Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks’ just a few years later.
Finally, how is this ‘opinion’ to be measured? By opinion poll? Contributors to this forum will be quick to point out that, though useful as a snapshot of the spread of thought around an issue, it would be very difficult to ask the right questions in the right way, of enough people to gain an accurate picture. By referendum? How ready has the Government been to use referenda for other issues? And in the depths of a recession, with voter turn out as low as it usually is, would the time and cost be worth it? Perhaps by a TV phone vote? Perhaps not.
The fact is such issues are complex and technical. Every case is different. Every person responds differently to pain, to drugs and to the mental and emotional strain of such a situation. Decisions about the laws that shape how we treat the most vulnerable among us cannot be swayed by tides of emotion. They must be made calmly, rationally, with attention to the facts, and drawing on the bodies of thought that have gone before.
This is not to say that public opinion can or should be ignored. Western society places a high value on allowing its citizens to be and, significantly, to feel part of the decision-making process on the issues they care about. In the Theos report Neither Private nor Privileged, Nick Spencer writes: “In a representative democracy...public opinion will gradually shape the concept of the good that underlies the state” (emphasis added). Rather than doing this in a series of knee-jerk reactions based on emotional appeals, though, it needs to be weighed, considered and filtered by the appropriate authorities.
“The political system,” Spencer continues, “is designed to prevent unduly privileging certain conceptions over others.” A society which values its citizens, their feelings, their needs, and their rights can express this best by listening to them, then offering them fair, principled leadership. Anything less, in the words of Dominic Lawson, “is guaranteed to become the perpetual tyranny of the majority over all minorities.”
Philippa Tachbrook is a Marketing Consultant.