Assisted suicide isn’t a choice we should give ourselves

Danny Webster challenges the idolisation of autonomy, highlighting how assisting suicide undermines the value of choice and freedom

When it was first announced that Kim Leadbeater MP would introduce a private member’s bill on assisted suicide, it was provisionally entitled a ‘choice at the end of life bill’. Eventually it evolved into the even more euphemistic ‘Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.’  

The issue of choice is one of the aspects of debate around this law that is underexamined - after all, the logic goes, people should be free to make the choices that they wish to and when people are suffering we should act with compassion and support their choices. Perhaps opponents of the change - myself included - have been reluctant to question this, instead focusing on the very many deficiencies within the Bill. 

The healthy limits of choice

But to accept the premise of increasing choice is to fundamentally misunderstand the value and purpose of freedom, alongside the utility of our freedom to choose. Our freedom to choose what we want is constrained in countless ways that we understand, accept and know is for the good of us and works to the benefit of our wider society.