Public Policy researcher explains why opposing assisted suicide is a gospel issue
Last week, Labour peer Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe provoked outrage when he appeared to support assisted suicide as a method of population control.
This was during the second reading in the Lords of Kim Leadbeater’s bill for legalising assisted suicide. You can watch the clip below, which led to outrage from some quarters.
Nikki da Costa, the former director of legislative affairs at 10 Downing Street, asked openly whether Lord Brooke was advocating assisted suicide as a form of population control.
Speaking on behalf of the Scottish Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Anthony Horan blasted the comments.
Writing in the Spectator, Madeline Grant characterised Lord Brooke’s speech as ‘truly bonkers’.
But Dignity in Dying, which campaigns to change the law, tweeted in support of his speech.
How do we need to view Lord Brooke’s short speech from a Christian perspective?
What Lord Brooke said in full
Here are his words in context.
I am a believer that there is some higher power, some spirit or energy of creation. It was there before humans and their religions came along, and it is here now with us. If the human race disappears—as it might, faced with AI and climate change—that power, which gives purpose, goodness, beauty and love, will continue indefinitely. For me, it is my source of hope.
That power, however, also gives me the freedom of choice. I have been here since 1997, so, like the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, I have been involved in numerous attempts to change this law. Unlike her, I voted against Lord Joffe’s Bill in 2004, and I voted against other similar initiatives. In 2014, I spoke and voted against the Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton. But much has changed since then, and God moves in a mysterious way, in my experience. I have come now to take a decision to change my mind.
Experience has shown over recent years that change does happen: it happens to churches and it happens to me. When I first came here, there were no women Bishops. The Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 changed that. That is a minor change compared with this century’s growth in the world population from 6.1 billion to 8.2 billion—a 25% increase in 25 years. Just think what the 2025 numbers would be if abortion had not been legalised or there had not been wide-scale usage and advocacy of contraception. Indeed, the growth of homosexuality throughout society has reduced the number of children that we would have had. Had the churches had their way, we would have had a very much bigger population than we presently have, facing the difficulties we have with climate change. We all have change taking place around us, including the churches.
Lord Brooke’s spiritual starting-point
Lord Brooke’s supposed “higher power…spirit or energy of creation” is not the Creator God of the Bible. Worship of an energy of creation is worship of part of the creation, not the Creator (Romans 1:25).
He justifies his turn to support assisted suicide by saying that since Lord Falconer’s bill in 2014 ‘much has changed’ and ‘God moves in mysterious ways’. As he can’t really be said to believe in God, surely this is taking the Lord’s name in vain, going against the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses (Exodus 20:7).
Could the human race disappear?
Lord Brooke fears that the human race could disappear, due to ‘AI or climate change’.
The entire Bible including Jesus’ own teaching contradict such pessimism and lack of hope in this regard. In all the passages of the Bible that talk about the future, none say that the human race will be killed off in any way, and certainly not by change in the climate let alone human technological advances. Jesus Christ Himself is clear that there will be people alive when He returns to earth (e. g. Matthew 24; Luke 18 8; John 14:3; Revelation 1:7-8).
Choice and change as the basis of morality
It is very clear that Lord Brooke puts individual choice and rights as the basis of his morality. He claims – without offering any evidence to prove his point – that the ‘higher power’ in which he believes has somehow given him a choice on the matter of assisted suicide. In reality however, as there is no evidence that this ‘higher power’ exists or that it has given him a choice, the historical evidence is what matters here. It shows that some politicians have over time chosen to try to change the law so that assisted suicide is not penalised as suicide under the Suicide Act 1961.
Lord Brooke then tries to justify his change of mind to support assisted suicide by saying that ‘much has changed’ since 2014. This is an argument we hear from time to time by people who want to legalise assisted suicide. It can also be heard by those Christians who aren’t courageous enough to make a public stand against the law. Exactly what Lord Brooke means by change is what led to criticism.
World population growth as the reason for legalising assisted suicide
Lord Brooke prefaced his remarks by noting that ‘change happens’. Indeed he said ‘it happens to churches, and it happens to me’. This is the kind of banal nonsense that a management consultant would say to a dying church denomination in need of reviving. ‘Change or die!’ the slogan would run. The idea is that we just need to go with the flow of change in society’s predominant moral values or get left behind. This kind of pressure has been around for at least sixty years if not longer, and during that time the denominations that succumbed to it one way or another have all declined to the point of near-collapse.
The growth of the world’s population is seen by Lord Brooke as alarming, and as something that could have been worse had the birth-rate not been curbed, and had homosexuality not been allowed to grow.
Ignoring the real problems
It does not occur to Lord Brooke that the UK is very small in global population terms. There is nothing here in terms of balancing different moral commitments, or anything less than a global context for the argument. Alarm at climate change is prioritised, but the actual issues around treatment of terminally ill people here in the UK are completely ignored. They are implicitly reduced to numbers in a Malthusian approach.
Thomas Malthus was an Anglican vicar who published ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ anonymously in 1798. He argued therein that the population would grow beyond the food supply, leading to famine, as well as a rising labour supply, suppressing wages. His proposed solution to this problem was a system of checks. Positive checks included policies to lower the birth-rate. Negative checks included encouraging (or at least not opposing) trends that would raise the death rate. Modern-day Malthusians have come to advocate legalising euthanasia and assisted suicide in order to ‘cull’ the ageing population of western countries.
Assisted suicide as an afterthought?
Only having set out his support of population control did Lord Brooke turn to talk briefly in favour of assisted suicide, approving of the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. This is what he said:
For some, dying is welcomed and is peaceful and serene; for others, it is full of great difficulties, pain, anxiety and misery, notwithstanding all the admirable efforts of palliative care. In my experience in recent years, I have seen people with terminal illnesses dying in fear, acute pain and misery. Of course, this can be avoided, as has been said by others, if one has the money. Anyone can go to Switzerland to Dignitas for assisted dying at a price. Further, you can go virtually safe in the knowledge that it is highly unlikely that any punitive action will be taken against you. Why is not such action taken? Is it not because most people see assistance with dying for the terminally ill as an act of caring, compassion and love? For those without the funds for that, this Bill, amended as the House sees fit, provides just that: for them to do it at their home. Who am I to deny that those less able to afford it should not have that choice?
This is the sum total of what Lord Brookes had to say in the debate. Just let people have assisted suicide in their own homes for free. Supposedly this would be to alleviate them of fear, acute pain and misery, but in reality is in order to help the United Kingdom do its bit for global population control.
Population control is a counterfeit gospel
It’s highly significant that fear that the human race might disappear is linked to wanting to reduce our numbers by allowing us to commit suicide with the help of others. In other words, a section of the population is to be sacrificed to save the human race.
If this sounds like a counterfeit of the Gospel, where the one God-man Jesus died for all the people, that’s because it is exactly that.
The Bible teaches that we are saved because Jesus became vulnerable and conquered death by dying on the cross in our place and rising from the dead.
The counterfeit gospel of population control basically says this: to save the human race from collective extinction, we can only prevent our collective extinction by sacrificing our most vulnerable.
Mockery of Jesus Christ
It must be said that in all the minutiae of moral debates on assisted suicide, we do not often stand back and see that opposing it is a first-order gospel issue.
Denial of the Second Coming and of the power of Christ’s crucifixion to conquer death is characterised by mockery. The gospels tell us that the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked Jesus by saying ‘He saved others but he can’t save himself’ – from death (Matthew 27:42).
In his second letter, the Apostle Peter warns that in the last days, scoffers will come along who will mock the promise of the second coming of Christ (2 Peter 3:3-7).
Legalising assisted suicide conveys the message that death is not our last enemy as the Bible teaches. It will lead many to think that we should stop fighting death and instead simply embrace it. This will have an effect not only on much-needed medical research into illnesses currently deemed terminal. It will have a profound effect on us and the entire country spiritually. Normalising suicide will make it harder for the gospel to be understood, and will lead to further attempts at marginalisation of true Christian witness. It is likely to lead to more cowardice – especially from within the churches, one suspects – whereby some will attempt to hide the light on this issue by censoring and cancelling the faithful.
This is why opposing assisted suicide is a first-order gospel issue. We have no right to remain silent about the bill on this matter.
