England’s former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord George Carey, has said he supports assisted suicide as people are “deciding the matter for themselves” and believes Jesus himself would support the measure.
Writing in The Mail on Sunday newspaper ahead of this September’s debate in Parliament on the Assisted Dying Bill, Lord Carey acknowledges that “for years, like many in the Church [of England], I was totally against any change in the law, believing that it was a slippery slope with potentially drastic consequences.”
However, following a meeting with a woman who had helped an ill friend to die by suicide, and having examined his conscience on the issue, Lord Carey admits he changed his mind and now backs the passage of the Bill.
“In difficult ethical matters I often find myself asking: ‘What would Jesus do?’,” he writes. “I think I know what he wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t say: ‘There, there. Pain is good for you. Take it like a man or a woman.’ No, I think he would expect us in these modern times, with all the skills that doctors have, to tend the very vulnerable at the end of life and help them cross into the place of peace that they are craving.”
Acknowledging that his stance places him directly at odds with the majority of members of the Church of England, Lord Carey writes: “I am sad that I am out of step with my own Church’s official position. I respect the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the bishops who are fighting against this change on a thoughtful and compassionate basis. But I believe that the opinions of churchgoers – and even ministers and clergy – are much more evenly balanced on the issue.”
The current Archbishop of Canterbury has previously described the proposed assisted suicide legislation as “mistaken and dangerous” and “a double-edged sword”.
However, Lord Carey contends: “The train has already left the station. People are deciding the matter for themselves; they are taking action that is essentially illegal and spending thousands of pounds to end their lives abroad.”
Lord Carey has publicly aligned himself with a group lobbying for assisted suicide, Dying with Dignity and has appeared in a promotional video for the group in which he states that “it is a profoundly Christian and moral thing to devise a law that enables people if they so choose to end their lives with dignity”.