The duty not to ever become burdensome to others does not actually exist.
The duty not to ever become burdensome to others does not actually exist.
T here is a tendency among cultural and social conservatives toward declinism. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences has led some of its less careful readers to think that Western civilization took a wrong turn because William of Ockham told his students that only particulars are real, and universals are just linguistic conventions. Cut off from the belief that we perceive reality by the intellect and marooned in the delusion that we perceive reality only by the senses, we have been wandering into traps ever since, trying to guide ourselves with a lantern that gives no light of its own, only dimly reflects the light of the moon.
But the reality is that the West is always defecting from some Christian ideals, and returning back to others, or rediscovering and restating them in ways we think are acceptable. At least that is what I think we’ve observed in the U.K. Parliament over the past year while it debated, then voted for the Terminally Ill Adults Bill, then debated it again before rejecting it finally. This defeat for what Pope John Paul II called “the culture of death” is a reminder that we are not being conducted down the road to perdition by forces we cannot ever turn back, but traveling through this life in freedom, running into some disasters, and avoiding others.
The bill, if passed, would have allowed medical professionals to assist patients in suicide after a diagnosis that they had six months or less to live. In 2025, the Commons passed it by a vote of 314 to 291. It then went on to the upper chamber, the House of Lords, where debate was especially spirited. Theresa May and Arlene Foster, former leaders of the Tories and Democratic Unionist Party, respectively, were particularly moving while speaking out against the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of coercion that are at work. The opponents of the bill in the House of Lords, using unprecedented delay tactics, allowed the bill to run out of time. Kicked back into the House of Commons, it was defeated by a cross-partisan coalition speaking on behalf of disability advocates and hammering home that dignity already inheres in a dying person; it’s not something that is secured or enhanced by poisons.
Advocates for assisted suicide talk about dignity and freedom to choose. They talk as if they are opening up new options for free actors to freely exercise and flatter themselves as merciful for allowing people to escape the humiliations that illness and infirmity inflict. Or they cast their opponents as sadists, whose vain moral demands force people to undergo the tortures of prolonged, painful final agonies before dying.
But what is really happening is that assisted suicide establishes a new morality, and that new morality intensifies the deluding pull of a felt duty that does not in fact exist: the duty not to ever become burdensome to others. The reason that assisted suicide laws have always started as an option for those experiencing a final agony and expand to many others who are not enduring this is because so few people in the actual process of dying request to be killed. They ask for pain medicines, or for company from loved ones or carers. In surveys of people who choose assisted dying, the majority are not in severe pain or suffering a present horror; they are fearful of pain and depressed about the prospect of dying or their loss of “autonomy.”
The truth is, we are born burdensome to others, and many of us die that way. Our sense of “autonomy” in between is a kind of emergent flattery. We depend on others, whether we admit it or not. It’s just that, when you are in your strength and good health, at the top of your career and in the black, you also know you are contributing not just to yourself, but to others. And you are.
One of the most interesting interventions came from Lancashire’s Labour MP Ashley Dalton, who sat through previous debates on this matter with a secret — her terminal cancer diagnosis. In this latest round of parliamentary debate, she appeared with a bald head that gave evidence of her treatment. She made many of the usual arguments. A doctor’s prediction about how long you have to live, when it extends beyond hours or days, is notoriously unreliable. She criticized those who sought to frighten ill people with highly unlikely scenarios of awful physical impairment. She reminded the house that for most people with terrible illness, proper palliative care meant that “death can be gentle.” But it was her testimony about suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts in the wake of her diagnosis, and then overcoming them with treatment and the support of her friends, that really moved others.
It’s true that the fear of death has conspired along with our care to make caring for the dying more expensive than it might be. And carers do, though they are sometimes loath to admit it, feel a peacefulness when those they cared for are no longer needing them. The dying are often made to feel that the end of their lives has nothing to contribute to the rest of us, that they are falling into our debt. But Dalton’s very presence in the Commons demonstrated the opposite. We all travel down this road, and in the distance we perceive a fearful shadow over the way we must go. Dalton and those who go ahead of us with courage and hope do not lay heavy burdens on us, but lift them.