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Tony Nicklinson, the assisted suicide campaigner whose High Court bid to change the law failed last week, died yesterday.
According to reports, he was heartbroken at the Court’s decision and could not understand how the legal arguments made on his behalf could have failed. The case was brought on the basis that Nicklinson had lost the autonomy and dignity that his legal team claimed are guaranteed under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act. In a statement to the Court, he said "My life can be summed up as dull, miserable, demeaning, undignified and intolerable. …it is misery created by the accumulation of lots of things which are minor in themselves but, taken together, ruin what’s left of my life. Things like…constant dribbling; having to be hoisted everywhere; loss of independence.."
The judgement, though compassionate in tone, holds firmly to existing jurisprudence on the issue. To end a life is murder and to allow assisted suicide would be to create a lacuna in the law. On such an understanding Parliament has rejected legislation. The three judges agreed that constitutionally it was not the role of the Court to alter this law in that way.
Saimo Chahal, Tony Nicklinson’s solicitor, said after his death that his fight was nevertheless not in vain. "The right to die with dignity, issues Tony championed, will not be forgotten due to the light that [he] shone on them and … this important debate will continue due to Tony".
When debate in Parliament begins again (and it will, since Lord Faulkner intends a Private Members Bill in the Autumn) the key concepts at stake will be those of autonomy and dignity - exactly those highlighted in this case. It is the recognition of these things, argue campaigners, which clearly demand that someone should have the right to assistance to die at the time and in the manner of their own choosing. Parliament will have to decide whether these are the values that should be recognised in law above all others.
The Christian tradition says they are not. Put simply, personhood isn’t grounded in autonomy or dignity but – to adopt John Zizoulas’ phrase – by ‘being in communion’. A person is not a biological entity under autonomous control, nor an individual personality, but a being in relation to other beings. At the end of life, choices are constrained for all people – no one chooses the natural limitations of old age, for example, but the loss of autonomy and independence do not make us less human. On the contrary, there is the possibility that we become more human.
And though Tony Nicklinson’s final years certainly lacked the dignity we have through being firmly in control of our own life, it did not lack the dignity of being a person – of loving and of being loved, of giving and receiving. Indeed, his life was endued with the dignity of acting with authenticity and purpose for a cause in which he believed, attracting the respect – if not the agreement – of anyone familiar with his story. There is a deep and admittedly bitter irony here. Literally in extremis, in clear unhappiness, when he was dependent and wholly without autonomy, Nicklinson’s life was deeply meaningful, serious and well lived.
Commentators have wilfully misunderstood the theological argument to offer a simplistic choice between those who humanely say that people should control when and how they die and the stupid and cruel obscurantism which insists that God is the final arbiter of the moment of departure. No, it’s a Christian anthropology which is far more appealing than any other, and which tells us that meaningfulness of life isn’t found in our ability to control its conditions. This isn’t just a matter of assisted suicide. Why are we so keen to write people off when they drop below optimum performance? Why do we treat elderly care, as Matthew Taylor asks, as a depressing problem which we can only hope to mitigate rather than a celebration of the virtues of long life? In doing so, we put both the cared for and carers on the margins of society.
I’m not suggesting equivalence between these issues and the Nicklinson case, but there are commonalities. Perhaps he, his family, and his many sympathisers would find these arguments a perverse and risible appropriation of their suffering but - for me - he has shed real light on the debate, if not in the way he intended.
Paul Bickley is Director of Political Programme at Theos | @mrbickley
Image by audi_insperation from flickr.com available under this Creative Commons Licence.
