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Euthanasia and Suicide

Euthanasia

A summary of the arguments used by the Church of England against legalising euthanasia and assisted suicide can be found here. These were sent to every MP in April 2006.

At the July 2005 General Synod, members voted 291-1 in favour of the following motion.

'That this Synod, in the light of the current public debate about Assisted Suicide and Voluntary Euthanasia ask the Archbishops’ Council and the Mission and Public Affairs Council, and those who speak on their behalf, to continue to advocate and develop the principles and arguments contained in the joint submission of the Church of England House of Bishops and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales to the House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill made in September 2004.'

 A copy of the briefing paper prepared for this debate can be read here, as can the opening speech by the Bishop of St Albans.

In 2004, the Church of England House of Bishops and the Roman Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales issued a joint statement on Euthanasia in response to the House of Lords Select Committee on Assisted Dying.

In 1998, the Lambeth Conference discussed Euthanasia and the resolution passed at the Conference can be read here.

Suicide

Traditionally the Christian Churches were very severe on suicides and attempted suicides, refusing the former burial in consecrated ground, since it was argued that the person who committed suicide was expressing his or her total lack of faith in God.

Nowadays, Christians generally recognise that suicide is not so much a deliberate rejection of life as an expression of dissatisfaction with the particular life the person is leading, and in many cases is a cry for help. To take your life is obviously a muddled and unsatisfactory way of responding to an unsatisfactory personal state of affairs, but seeing things in this way has led Christians to treat suicides and potential suicides as they would treat people who were depressed or sick in other ways, ie. by seeking to help them where possible, and certainly not to engage in moral condemnation of them. This shift in attitude led the Board for Social Responsibility to produce Ought Suicide to be a Crime? The Board pressed the Government to change the law so that suicide should no longer be treated as a crime. The change came about in 1961.