By the time Dr Charles Killick Millard rose to ship his inaugural presidential handle to the Society of Medical Officers of Well being on 16 October 1931, dialogue of its contents had already begun within the press. Millard’s speech, which was a name for the legalisation of euthanasia for consenting incurable sufferers, sparked each controversy and widespread help, and marked a breakthrough second for concepts which had been debated in philosophical circles because the late nineteenth century. 4 years later, inspired by the response to the speech, Millard based the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society (VELS) as a campaigning motion for euthanasia in Britain.
Central to the VELS marketing campaign was a invoice drafted by Millard. In 1936 a model of this invoice was debated within the Home of Lords, the primary time the difficulty was voted on in Parliament. The invoice was firmly defeated, with 35 votes in opposition to and 14 for, however Millard’s proposal nonetheless offered the mannequin for nearly each subsequent try to vary the legislation. On 16 October 2024, the anniversary of Millard’s speech, Kim Leadbeater MP launched one other personal member’s invoice to the Home of Commons. Although, not like Millard’s authentic proposal, the affected person and never the physician could be required to manage the deadly dose, Leadbeater’s invoice would legalise assisted suicide in comparable circumstances and with comparable safeguards to these proposed by Millard nearly a century earlier than. Supporting Leadbeater’s efforts is the marketing campaign organisation Dignity in Dying, the re-named Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society. Now that the invoice has handed its Second Studying, assisted dying is nearer to legalisation than at any level within the nearly hundred-year historical past of the motion.
Gentlemanly examples
In some ways, the talk within the Home of Lords over the 1936 Voluntary Euthanasia (Legalisation) Invoice sounded remarkably just like the debates of as we speak. Supporters like Millard argued that Britain was an ageing society during which deaths from most cancers had been rising. Regardless of advances within the remedy of ache, many terminally unwell individuals had been condemned to lengthy and painful deaths. However it was inside the technique of medical practitioners to shorten this struggling and, on compassionate grounds, hasten a affected person’s dying. With applicable safeguards, together with the sign-off of two docs, abuses of a brand new system might be minimised. The arguments in opposition to additionally sound acquainted. No system of safeguards might forestall the unscrupulous from pressuring the incurable to simply accept medically assisted dying and in any case a way of being a burden was prone to complicate consent. The connection between docs and sufferers could be remodeled for the more severe. As soon as the door was opened, a slippery slope could be discovered behind it and, earlier than lengthy, euthanasia could be out there to – or compelled upon – different weak individuals.
However whereas lots of the points had been comparable, there have been additionally hanging variations. Opening the talk in favour of the Voluntary Euthanasia (Legalisation) Invoice on 1 December 1936, the Labour peer Lord Ponsonby stated that worry of being a burden would possible account for a big proportion of instances of voluntary euthanasia. Removed from being an moral dilemma, Ponsonby argued that this was a very good and noble factor. He pointed to the gentlemanly instance of the Antarctic explorer Lawrence Oates, who, slightly than be a burden to his comrades, walked off to die within the snow; a terminally unwell affected person selecting euthanasia slightly than be a burden to their household was to be applauded. Ponsonby’s remarks had been a political misstep – given the truth that the invoice made no reference to a way of being a burden as grounds for euthanasia, it re-opened the query of the slippery slope which his opening speech in any other case sought to shut.
To assuage such fears, the invoice was rigorously restricted in its scope to the intolerably struggling incurably unwell. Each Millard in 1931 and Ponsonby in 1936 had been eager to emphasize that the legislation wouldn’t apply to the disabled or to aged victims of dementia. However because the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, identified within the debate: ‘A lot of those that are behind the noble Lord in bringing ahead this Invoice undoubtedly ponder its after-extension to different instances which for the current he has dominated out.’ Millard seems to have been open-minded in personal concerning the eventual non-voluntary euthanasia of the disabled. Eugenic concepts appealed to many fans for euthanasia, although most mainstream eugenicists had been sceptical of its eugenic advantages, preferring to forestall the births of undesirable classes of individuals slightly than to hasten their deaths. Proponents usually in contrast their spiritual opponents’ objections to the invoice to their objections to contraception or sterilisation, each of which had been key to the programme of British eugenics in recent times.
Medical authority
In his inaugural lecture, and persistently over the next years, Millard cited spiritual authorities such because the writings of Church of England clergymen in favour of his concepts. Whereas the Anglican bishops within the Lords voted in opposition to the invoice, their speeches expressed sophisticated emotions and an acceptance that it was a fraught moral dilemma. The archbishop of Canterbury felt that whereas the legislation shouldn’t encourage suicide there have been instances the place it was proper to put down one’s life for one’s buddies and he adopted Ponsonby in pointing to the instance of Captain Oates. The bishop of Norwich queried whether or not euthanasia was a non secular or moral query in any respect. Catholics had been essentially the most hardline spiritual opponents of euthanasia and Lord FitzAlan, a Catholic, led the opposition within the Lords debate. However whereas FitzAlan argued partly based mostly on his religion, he additionally invoked opposition to the invoice from Muslims and Jews. Britain in 1936 was a extra spiritual nation than Britain in 2024, however the bearing of faith on the legislation was fraught. Not for the final time, this seems to have weighed closely on the Anglican bishops, constitutionally privileged to sit down within the Home of Lords, however unsure of their function as ethical legislators for the nation.
In truth, the archbishop of Canterbury stated that the complexities of drugs on the finish of life should be left to ‘the connection of mingled intimacy and accountability which exists between the physician and the affected person’. It was not spiritual authority however medical authority which secured the invoice’s defeat. At the start of the talk, each Ponsonby and FitzAlan referred to the presence within the chamber of Lord Dawson and Lord Horder, two well-regarded physicians. There was uncertainty about how they might vote and Ponsonby described Dawson as ‘trying mysterious’. When the docs rose, they made a number of arguments which might be recognisable as we speak: that it might be a slippery slope, that sufferers might be pressured by household and buddies, that terminal sickness was in observe exhausting to outline, that the query was sophisticated by psychological struggling.
However their most hanging arguments had been these regarding the function of the physician. Dawson didn’t oppose euthanasia in precept, however argued that the invoice would codify in legislation what was greatest left to the experience of medical practitioners. The hazard of the invoice was in its bureaucratisation of the connection between physician and affected person. Horder likewise protested the state’s intervention into the physician–affected person relationship, bemoaning that underneath the proposal euthanasia could be administered not by a health care provider identified to the affected person however by what he known as ‘strangers from Whitehall’. Horder’s opposition to the invoice additionally reveals the sophisticated and ambivalent relationship between eugenics and euthanasia, as he was on the time president of the Eugenics Society, a lot of whose members had been additionally members of the VELS. Although he didn’t point out it within the Lords, Dawson had the truth is carried out an unlawful involuntary euthanasia earlier within the yr, having administered a deadly dose of cocaine and morphine to King George V on his deathbed.
Authentic downside
The Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society didn’t anticipate to win the talk, and had been delighted regardless of their defeat that that they had secured such a outstanding platform and sparked such widespread nationwide dialogue. However after the conflict, revulsion on the Nazi euthanasia programme was a setback to the trigger. When a invoice was launched to the Lords in 1950 it provoked such opposition that it was withdrawn and not using a vote. The affiliation of VELS with the Nazi regime was simplistic, however not totally unfair. Millard’s openness to fellow travellers meant that in 1950 he lobbied for the discharge from British custody of Sigbert Ramsauer, who had been an SS camp physician at Dachau, Mauthausen and Loibl, on the grounds that the medical killings he had carried out had been euthanasia. It was not till 1969, throughout a interval of social reform led from the backbenches, that Parliament debated euthanasia once more. Earlier than the unsuccessful debate on the 1969 invoice, the Earl of Listowel, who had spoken within the debate in 1936, wrote that the latter had ‘began a development of public opinion that has been rising steadily ever since’. The concept that a change within the legislation is inevitable, {that a} groundswell of public opinion can not, in the long term, be prevented, appears to be as outdated as the difficulty itself.
Summing up the talk in 1936, Ponsonby known as it ‘an especially attention-grabbing dialogue of a wholly new downside’. Nearly 90 years later, the issue can now not be stated to be new. However within the Thirties, in a tradition steeped in concepts about eugenics, extra comfy with the patrician authority of medical consultants and with a higher emphasis on the social advantages of euthanasia, the arguments generally tackle shapes that are unfamiliar and even stunning. Tracing this debate to its origins reveals a query that’s recognisable, with solutions that are alien.
George Morris is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary College of London.
