This is a week on which we will look back in horror. Our voices must not go quiet in the battle against the automatons of autonomy.
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb …All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Psalm 139: 13, 16b
Make a note of the date and time. At around 2.30 in the afternoon Friday 20 June 2025, MPs sitting in the House of Commons at Westminster voted to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales.
This is a deeply divisive piece of legislation fronted by Kim Leadbeater MP, championed by Esther Rantzen and given financial backing from Dignity in Dying aka the Voluntary Euthanasia Society.
Passing it is a grievous decision and a grim indictment of the disregard that so many in the House of Commons have for the most vulnerable in society. Coming so soon after Tuesday’s vote to dramatically liberalise abortion law, it is heartbreaking.
It was relatively close in the end:314 in favour and 291 against – a margin of just 23 and less than half the gap at Second Reading. If your MP voted against assisted suicide, do take a moment to write and thank them.
And yet it demonstrates again just how out of step many MPs are with wider society. It was only a few days ago that MPs agreed to allow women in England and Wales to kill their unborn babies at any stage of pregnancy without sanction. This, in a Britain where more than 10 million human beings have already been killed since the passing of the Abortion Act in 1967. At present, the death toll runs at around 300,000 a year. Around one in four pregnancies currently end in abortion – almost all for social reasons; deaths justified largely on the grounds of ‘choice’ and ‘autonomy’.
Choice. Autonomy. These are the Baals of the modern age to which MPs, like automatons, have unthinkingly chosen to bow. And so we see with this assisted suicide debate.
