assisted suicide Archives - Catholic Herald

assisted suicide

Support for assisted suicide losing momentum in Scotland

April 17, 2024

Support for assisted suicide in Scotland has declined significantly, according to recent polls and research. The Journal of Medical Ethics Forum has posted an article by Prof. David Albert Jones, Director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, showing that support for assisted suicide in Scotland has lost momentum and could even be waning. Meanwhile, three polls conducted by the pro-assisted-suicide group

The cynical politics (and politicians) endorsing assisted dying and abortion

April 14, 2024

This is a bleak time to be pro-life. The holistic vision of human life from conception to natural death as being invested with dignity and worthy of respect is being steadily undermined by legislatures. In Britain and Ireland, there are moves to introduce assisted dying into law. An Irish parliamentary inquiry has recommended legislation to

England’s ‘Christian inheritance’ at stake in UK General Election

April 01, 2024

Easter has arrived early in a year when a General Election is anticipated. “To elect” means to choose. This Easter holiday celebrates the greatest and most enduring choice our country ever made, in embracing Christianity more than a millennium ago. It was a choice made not merely by the leaders of society but personally –

Labour leader Keir Starmer ‘commits’ to assisted suicide vote if Prime Minister

March 14, 2024

The leader of the UK’s Labour Party has stated his personal commitment to changing the law on assisted suicide and promised to bring forward a Bill to legalise the practice if he is elected Prime Minister in the forthcoming General Election. Sir Keir Starmer made his pledge in a telephone conversation with Dame Esther Rantzen, a celebrity

As with the Sexual Revolution, we must heed ‘slippery slope’ warnings about assisted suicide

January 16, 2024

There are determined moves to make assisted suicide legal in both the UK and in Ireland. In advance of any legal decision, the Irish Medical Council has removed the ban on participating in the “deliberate killing” of patients from its medical guidelines. In the UK, the Parliamentary Health and Social Care Committee has been taking

Legalising euthanasia will ‘allow a destabilising exception to the principle that one may not kill the innocent’

August 23, 2023

Keir Starmer may become our next prime minister. In 2010, in his role as Director of Public Prosecutions, he issued guidelines concerning which cases of assisted suicide were more likely and which less likely to be prosecuted. Critics felt that this was a camel’s-nose-under-the-tent strategy, through which assisted suicide would be normalised in some cases because

‘Careless words cost lives’ – reflections on recent statements from the Pontifical Academy for Life

April 25, 2023

A number of news outlets have picked up the story that Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, has appeared to lend his support the legal toleration of assisted suicide. The story is based on a speech he gave during the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. In a later clarification, the Archbishop stated that he “reaffirms his

When right becomes duty

January 27, 2022

Simon Caldwell is horrified by how far ‘assisted dying’ has shifted from putting the terminally ill first