'Personally, I am opposed to slavery, but I believe that people should have the right to choose.' If we employed this approach to all our current social problems - drugs, child abuse, pornography - where would it leave us? We must confront society with the harsh reality that the 'freedom of choice' argument when applied equally to good and evil choices is senseless. In 1967 the pro-abortion lobby dismissed as scaremongering that the legislation was the 'thin edge of the wedge'; that the legislation would lead to abortion on demand and ultimately to euthanasia. Abortion on demand is ade facto reality in Britain. In 1990 the first Bill to make euthanasia legal was introduced before the House of Commons. Although it was defeated this was only the opening salvo. The 1967 Abortion Act was the only conclusive one in a long line of Bills which had been introduced over the years. Jane Hastings, one of CARE's research team, has provided me with some of the discussion papers already being circulated calling for euthanasia. In the British Journal of General Practice of March 1990, M.R. Bellis, a consultant geriatrician at Hackney Hospital in London, says:
I hope that in future the rights of children to make decisions for their parents who are incapacitated by age or dementia will be so well recognised that 'living wills' will only need to be made by people who wish particular family members, or persons outside the family, to represent them; or if they wish for treatment which they feel their natural proxy might find difficult to support, for example, euthanasia ... Perhaps it is not even too much to hope that in future the success of the NHS may be able to be measured in terms of a decreasing, rather than the present monotonously cited, increasing life expectancy.
We should not be surprised to hear these arguments being put forward by leading medics. This death-wishing is wholly consistent with our loss of respect for life at the other end of the spectrum. A basic respect for life is part of a seamless garment. That garment is woven together with a common thread. Here is a concern for life, justice, care and worth. When you consider the degradation of life today - destruction of family life, isolation of the elderly, collapse of communities and of good neighbourliness, contamination and plunder of creation, and indifference to the world's hungry poor - you can see how that seamless garment has become a tatter of rags.