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As the United Kingdom’s House of Lords debates a bill to legalize assisted suicide, a British columnist is urging people to resist using the euphemism “assisted dying” in place of “assisted suicide,” even when they are accused of being insensitive or unkind for doing so.
Suicide is defined as intentionally killing oneself, columnist Sonia Sodha began in her Sept. 22 op-ed for The Times. The bill under debate would legally allow doctors to prescribe lethal drugs for patients who have a terminal illness and projected six months or less to live with, so the patients can take their own lives, Sodha wrote. “It is therefore, by definition, a bill to legalise medically assisted suicide.”
Though language has always been a crucial part of social campaigns, something new in this realm “is the attempt to emotionally blackmail people who don’t share your views into using your preferred euphemisms,” Sodha wrote, “because accurate language is somehow considered offensive or impolite.”
“To see how effective these attempts to control other people’s language can be in winning arguments, one need only consider the highly contested debate on gender and sex,” Sodha continued. Campaigners who spearheaded efforts to make “transgenderism” socially accepted “were able to quickly enforce a societal norm that it is rude, hateful or bigoted to refer to a man who identifies as female as anything other than a woman,” Sodha wrote.
One effect of this language control was seen in an instance where the BBC described a male killer, who identified as female, as a woman — leading to a distortion of reporting on male violence, Sodha related.
“We thus need to be very careful before succumbing to emotionally wrought pleas to use misleading or inaccurate language because it is the ‘kind’ thing to do,” Sodha later wrote. “Not only is there no moral obligation to do so, it can allow campaigners to distort public discourse in a way that camouflages harmful social consequences.”
Several pro-assisted suicide campaigners and several Lords have criticized those in the House who say “assisted suicide” and not “assisted dying,” according to Sodha. One group of campaigners accused House of Lords member Theresa May of being “deeply insensitive” for her language, Sodha wrote.
Sodha wrote, “The ‘assisted dying’ euphemism is a powerful one; in wrongly implying the legislation will safely exclude those the state ought not to help to kill themselves, it shores up the idea that to oppose it is unkind and denies the empowered a choice, rather than protecting people from wrongful deaths.”
Sodha noted that campaigners with terminal illnesses ask for a distinction between terms because “[t]hey see their desire to end their lives as something quite separate from suicide driven by anguish or depression: as a choice to end their lives earlier than they would otherwise naturally, because they wish to prevent their own pain and suffering. A rational, considered desire for death, not an irrational or despairing urge.”
“But in reality,” Sodha wrote, “there is no such clear line to be drawn.”
The bill does not account for coercion, pressure, or the question of whether the patient has the capacity for the decision, opening the door for persons depressed or despairing at their diagnosis to be given deadly drugs, Sodha argued.
The bill cannot protect the vulnerable, she wrote, and because of this, many medical experts, as well as the government’s suicide prevention advisor, oppose it.
