In May the States of Jersey will be deciding whether or not to request the Minister for Health and Social Services to bring forward primary legislation that will permit assisted dying in Jersey. If so, that new Law will require that Minister to establish an assisted dying service - with safeguards as set out in the proposal.
Those safeguards only control the earthly operation of the Law whilst the person seeking assisted dying is still alive. None of the safeguards can affect anything at all as soon when that person is dead.
Thus, a person seeking assisted dying will be answering the question posed by Shakespeare in his AD 1601 play “Hamlet”: “To be or not to be?”
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“To be, or not to be: that is the question. Whether it’s nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep.” Shall I end my sea of troubles either by myself unaided or, if I can’t do that unaided, then assisted by the Jersey Minister for Health and his services?
“No more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, it’s a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.” It seems so sensible when you put it like that…
“To sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil? … Who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's insolence, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office … when he himself might his quietus make [via suicide] with a bare bodkin [a simple tool]?” Indeed, why bear all this sort of pain?
“But that - that dread of something after death, that undiscovered country from whose bourn [boundary] no traveller returns - puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of…” Those ills have always been there – those unknowns – that just judgment, that reckoning.
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It is to trespass into that unexplained but wonderful area - life – to trespass into something which we value above all else, something which we ordinarily seek to preserve at all costs. But which we also self-interestedly and unjustifiably destroy with callous disregard for what may lie beyond.
The incidence of evil, pain and suffering in this world of human beings is steadily increasing. We have for some years all been living in a post-Christian era (but not a post-Christ era). Understandably, more and more human beings may well see their own death as the only solution to their suffering. But is death really the end? Please read again the words of Jesus in bold red above.
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| Above the human suffering and evil and pain in this world, there is the rejection, suffering and death of Jesus Christ, who came from above. That towers above all human suffering like a Bethlehem star. For those who cannot see this star an alternative may shortly be on offer through this proposed Law and this additional “service” which Jersey’s Health Minister will be obliged by Law to provide. But it will require some significant faith to be present in the soul of the sufferer – faith that there is nothing beyond, no dreams, no other country. For sure that faith will be bolstered by the Law, by those running the service, and by those advising the sufferer. It is not a faith that I share.
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