Assisted suicide: the British government puts care before death

In the United Kingdom, the head of the government asked, on Wednesday, that the debate on introducing assisted suicide be suspended until palliative care and the accompaniment of persons are properly funded. In other words: to care for the dying before thinking of putting them to death.

Tradition has never pretended that suffering was nothing; it answered it not with the syringe, but with the bedside. « Sick, and you visited me », says the Lord, who made this care the very measure of the last judgment. And Scripture presses the faithful: « Be not slow to visit the sick. » Wherever the sick were abandoned, the Church built the hospital and the hospice; for the weak man is not a burden to be discharged, but a trust to be kept.

Measured against this rule, the news is a rare return to good sense. To put off the debate on death dealt out, in order first to fund care, is to set things back in their order: one does not offer death to him to whom one has not first offered presence. We do not deceive ourselves — the pressure to kill out of compassion will not disarm of itself. But this delay speaks a truth the age would like to forget: the answer to pain is not to shorten life, but to accompany the one who bears it. We welcome the reprieve; we pray it become a refusal.

Sources. Gospel according to Saint Matthew, XXV, 36; Ecclesiasticus, VII, 39; Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment.