Clever language wins arguments. It’s why millions of pounds are handed over to PR agencies by advertisers or political parties to devise pithy slogans. The cleverest language also often obscures reality. If a viewpoint is hitherto considered too controversial, one can simply reposition the debate by repackaging it with a positive spin in an attempt to reframe public sentiment.
Those of us who campaign for the rights of people with disabilities have watched an example of this slowly unfolding in the ongoing debate concerning assisted suicide (‘assisted dying’ is itself an example of language being used to disguise rather than define reality) with its advocates requisitioning the term ‘dignity’ for their side of the argument.
Hence the leading pressure groups for assisted suicide in Canada and Australia adopting the label ‘Dying with Dignity’; in the US, it is ‘Death with Dignity’ and leading the charge in the UK is ‘Dignity in Dying’, whose role as the true architects of Kim Leadbeater MP’s current parliamentary bill to legalise assisted suicide has scarcely been disguised: after all it was the organisation’s CEO, Sarah Wootton, who publicly revealed on social media the date for second reading of the Bill before the MP herself. It should not escape notice that even in its name, Dignity in Dying has employed language to soften its image: for most of its history the group was known as the ‘Voluntary Euthanasia Society’. But ‘euthanasia’, for good reason, carries baggage - particularly among communities advocating for disability rights. Not so much the word ‘dignity’. After all, who would not want to die with ‘dignity’?
But we must beware the sleight of hand that comes with such use of language and its implicit assumption about where ‘dignity’ resides. The mark of a civilised society is surely to define dignity not in the quality of human life - for there begins a slide into dystopian horrors - but in the reality of human life. We human beings have intrinsic dignity - the great social reforms of the past 150 years have recognised this: racism is wrong, for example, because all people share the common dignity intrinsic to and rightly due to all humanity. This dignity is neither lost nor diminished by class, capability or capacity. A common dignity is shared by prince and pauper, infant and adult, able-bodied and people with disabilities - the recent Paralympics acted as a powerful embodiment of this.
And yet, the commandeering of the word ‘dignity’ in favour of assisted suicide immediately introduces the notion that a person’s dignity is subjective and subject to a hierarchical scale. To put it bluntly, this is a clever, undignified lie, and a dangerous one at that.
This is no mere philosophical pontification. When assisted suicide is legalised, those people to whom society may subconsciously bestow less dignity and might therefore be considered eligible for a premature death are disproportionately affected. Indeed, even among those who wish to live rather than die, their worth is demeaned by the very existence of assisted suicide laws permitted for such minorities. How else are we to explain the fact that a recent poll in Canada found half of the public now think people with disabilities should be eligible for the country’s ‘MAID’ (another euphemism, standing for ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ but made to sound like a benevolent nurse who holds your hand through death) programme, and over a quarter believe MAID should be permitted for the poor and homeless? This is a far cry from the original criteria for assisted deaths in Canada when the practice was legalised in 2016 only for the terminally ill or those whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable”.
Introducing assisted suicide laws thus inevitably changes societal views concerning which lives are and are not worthwhile or, ‘dignified’. What has happened to the positive campaigns to protect the well-being of the poor, homeless and people with disabilities that were so prominent a generation ago but seem to have been usurped by a focus on newly constructed, more fashionable rights such as the so-called ‘right to die’?
The result of all this has been seen in a disabled Paralympian veteran in Canada being proactively offered MAID without requesting it, a quadriplegic woman from Ontario applying for MAID because she couldn’t access the help she needed and another veteran suffering from PTSD and a traumatic brain injury being given the option, unprompted, to be euthanised. Next in line for having their dignity relegated to “eligible to die at the hands of the state” status are likely to be people with mental illness or intellectual disabilities, prompting Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, to remind us that “Helping people with autism and intellectual disabilities to die is essentially eugenics” - an example of a more honest use of language in the debate.
Those advocating for assisted suicide in the UK may include celebrities and their campaign may employ emotive slogans that sound plausible at first hearing. Having lost my Dad in recent years and as others who have experienced caring for a loved one with a terminal illness know, dignity does not lie in capability, nor is it lost when a person with terminal illness suddenly loses capability.
Such loses, which come to each of us in time, have little to do with true dignity; indeed, there are few more dignified acts than to care for those who cannot always care for themselves. It is imperative therefore that we are not hoodwinked by the misleading language of those whose campaigning undermines the intrinsic worth of each person and that we offer instead a better way - compassionate, practical, social and palliative care that recognises the immutable dignity which belongs to each one of us.