One of Britain’s most influential newspapers, The Daily Express, has decided to back the legalisation of “assisted dying”. The Daily Express is a tabloid and is not known for its intellectual sophistication, but its editorial is rather puzzling. It reassures readers that “assisted dying” (good) is not euthanasia (bad) and is not assisted suicide (also bad). If it is neither of these, what is it?
Apparently, we must now regard poisons as medication and regard assisted killing as “assisted dying” — authentic assisted dying used to mean palliative care.
As George Orwell warned in 1984, the meaning of unpleasant-sounding words can be reversed when those in power want to make them more palatable. What used to be called “being killed” must now be called a “dignified death” and we must learn to see dying a natural death as inherently undignified.
