MPs are debating whether to legalise assisted dying ahead of a landmark vote on the issue this afternoon. The legislation, which would be limited to terminally ill patients with less than six months to live, will be decided by a free vote, meaning MPs have not been instructed by their parties on how to vote. Transport Secretary Louise Haigh has resigned after it emerged that she was convicted of making a false police report a decade ago. She says she told officers her work phone had been stolen when she was mugged, but later found the phone – which had in fact not been stolen – and was advised by her solicitor not to comment when called in for questioning. Donald Trump posted his traditionally magnanimous Thanksgiving message on social media yesterday, offering his best wishes to “the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country, but who have miserably failed, and will always fail, because their ideas and policies are so hopelessly bad”.

A slippery slope or an act of mercy?

Today, MPs have a rare free vote on one of the most consequential issues of all, says The Economist: the right to an assisted death. Opponents point to Canada, where the scope of the law has widened and the number of people ending their lives, for all sorts of reasons, has “risen sharply”. But Canada’s criteria were relatively extensive from the outset and have been expanded by successive court cases. A better comparison is the law in the Australian state of Victoria, which is “almost a mirror image” of the bill MPs are considering. Doctors there say they’ve seen no hint of coercion (“families often try to talk their loved ones out of it”). And when the state collects feedback afterwards, the most mentioned word is “peaceful”. Many seem reassured simply having the option: a fifth of those who have been given the lethal medication never take it.

It’s no use legislating on the basis of some “ideal case”, in which the decision is entirely “rational, self-generated and immune from murky influences”, says Kathleen Stock in The Sunday Times. Or hoping that if the circumstances are “not so ideal” in some particular case – if there’s family pressure, say, or a degree of poverty that makes life look bleak – some clever and independent-minded person will be around to put a stop to things. I assume the opposite. In the minds of the terminally ill, visions of a conveniently quick death can be too easily induced by the words of others. And with our groaning NHS and log-jammed courts, as well as a “generally creeping cultural reticence to say no to anybody about anything”, rubber-stamping seems all but guaranteed.

What’s being overlooked is that we’re on the cusp of a “fundamental redefinition of what it is to be human”, says Giles Fraser in UnHerd. Opponents of assisted dying are understandably trying to downplay the religious aspect, but this is “one of those areas where the idea of God has served us well”. Western culture is founded on the idea that God is the “ultimate guarantor of the value of human life”, and that human beings are “metaphysically special”. We are about to trade this in for what? Human value “plotted on an Excel spreadsheet”? O, brave new world.

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