05 September 2025

“Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Suicide, Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: Some Considerations (1)

(In memory of David, Jeremy Stanley and Walter)

St Joseph's Hospice, Hackney, East London

In part one of a two-part essay Sister Elizabeth John of the Dolgellau Carmelite monastery examines some of the moral issues at stake around Kim Leadbeater's proposed Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

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A Historical Study: The Moral Problem of ‘Assisted Dying’

This article is an exploration of some of the issues around suicide, euthanasia, and assisted suicide, based on an essay submitted in 2023 for the philosophy element of the Teresianum’s Online Certificate in Spiritual Theology.[1] It is not intended as a comprehensive summary of arguments for or against assisted suicide.

Terminology

Assisted Suicide: An individual is provided with a fatal drug and has to be capable of administering it themselves.

PAD:  Physician or clinician-assisted death- involves a trained professional administering the drug for the patient.

Euthanasia: Encompasses both of the above but sometimes has subliminal echoes and references, including what we usually do with our dying pets.[2]

Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID): The term, adopted in Canadian legislation, can include self or physician-administered situations and simply describes what it is.

Those in favour tend to use the term ‘Assisted Dying’, whereas those against refer to ‘Assisted Suicide’.

The Views of Some Philosophers on Suicide[3]

Most of the ancient city-states criminalised self-killing but there does not appear to have been a single word in ancient Greek or Latin that translates our word ‘suicide’.

Plato claimed, in the Laws, that suicide is “disgraceful … and its perpetrators should be buried in unmarked graves.” Apart from four exceptions,[4]  Plato saw suicide as “an act of cowardice or laziness undertaken by individuals too delicate to manage life’s vicissitudes.”[5]

However, the Stoics, (including Seneca), held that “whenever the means to living a naturally flourishing life are not available to us, suicide may be justified, regardless of the character or virtue of the individual in question.”

St Augustine, particularly in City of God, is generally credited with offering the first justification of the Christian prohibition on suicide, seeing it as “monstrous”.[6]

St. Thomas Aquinas defended this position on three grounds: (1) Suicide is contrary to natural self-love, whose aim is to preserve us. (2) Suicide injures the community of which an individual is a part. (3) Suicide violates our duty to God because God has given us life as a gift and in taking our lives, we violate His right to determine the duration of our earthly existence.[7]

This conclusion was codified in the medieval doctrine that suicide nullified human beings’ relationship to God, for our control over our body was limited to us (possession, employment), where God retained dominion, authority. Renaissance intellectuals generally affirmed the Church’s opposition to suicide.

David Hume launched a direct assault on the Thomistic position in his essay Suicide (1783).

In The Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant saw suicide as an attack on our rational wills, which are the source of our moral authority.

Suicide in the Bible

Seven people committed suicide in the Bible: Abimelech (Judges 9:54),  Samson (Judges 16:26–31), Saul and his armour-bearer (1 Samuel 31:3–6),  Ahithophel (2 Samuel 17:23), Zimri (1 Kings 16:18) and Judas Iscariot. (Matthew 27:5).

Judas' Remorse by José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior (1850 – 1899)

Except for Samson, who prayed to God for strength before leaning against the pillars of the temple and whose actions also caused the death of thousands of enemy Philistines, suicide is presented as a cowardly act undertaken by ungodly, disgraced men.[8]

(Dis)Honour, Glory, and Sacrifice

Ritual suicide (‘hara-kiri’ or ‘seppuku’) was committed in Japan, primarily by Samurai, who desired either to die with honour rather than falling into the hands of their enemies, or as a form of capital punishment, or because they had brought shame to themselves. Sometimes their wives also killed themselves. Socrates drank a cup of hemlock after having been found guilty of corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and of impiety. Duels were fought to restore honour.

Hindu women practised ‘sati’ (or ‘suttee’) – the immolation of a wife on the funeral pyre of her husband.  The Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, died in1963 by self-immolation in Saigon, protesting against the persecution of Buddhists in South Vietnam.

Groups of people have committed mass suicide: for example, members of religious cults (such as Heaven’s Gate in 1997), the women of Souli in Greece (to avoid capture by the Ottomans in 1803), and German civilians as well as Nazis towards the end of the Second World War. During the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, ‘many in Israel … chose to die rather than to be defiled by food or to profane the holy covenant.’      (1 Mac 1:62- 63)

St Ignatius of Antioch said that he was “voicing the mind of God” when he begged the Romans not to put any obstacles in the way of his martyrdom, so that “I may be made a sacrifice to God.”[9]  A concluding prayer option for the Common of One Martyr is, “…You gave Saint N. the grace to fight to the death for the true faith.” St Teresa and her brother “agreed to go off to the land of the Moors and beg them, out of love of God, to cut off our heads there.”[10] St Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to die in the place of a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz.

St Paul was ‘hard pressed’ between living and dying: he desired “to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better”, but realised it was more necessary for him to “remain in the flesh”. (Philippians 1:23–24) I knew several people who died of natural causes shortly after their loved ones had passed away. The Liebestod (‘love/death’) concept as seen in Tristan and Isolde, for example, is a dangerous distortion of the desire to be united with the beloved in death.

Burial of Suicides

Traditionally, in the UK suicides were buried at cross-roads, sometimes with a stake through their body. The Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, committed suicide in 1822 but was buried in Westminster Abbey, which may have prompted an 1823 Act which gave suicides the right to a private burial in a churchyard, but only at night and without a Christian service. Burial was allowed in daylight hours in 1882.[11]

The Catholic Church dropped its prohibition in Canon Law on funeral ceremonies for suicides in 1983 and the Church of England allowed full funerals for suicides in 2015.

Suicide as a Crime

Statistics from 2021 show that attempted suicide is still a crime in twenty countries (including Nigeria, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Guyana, Kenya, Pakistan and Cyprus), and is punishable by fines and up to three years in prison.[12]

Concerning Cyprus, an unfortunate situation occurred there recently: David Hunter, a British citizen who had lived in Cyprus for twenty years, killed his wife. He claimed that she had begged him to do so, though there was no proof, as she was in a lot of pain with blood cancer (she may not have been terminally ill); he then tried to kill himself. He maintained that she had lost her dignity. He was charged with murder, which was changed to manslaughter and then changed back to murder. Eventually, he was cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter and jailed for two years. He was released, as he had spent nineteen months in custody, but the prosecutors are appealing against the verdict.[13]

England and Wales: Prosecutions after Attempting Suicide

In October 1923, an out-of-work labourer Thomas McCarthy ‘drank something bad’ on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral after becoming depressed. He was sent to prison for a week.

Police found, in July 1958, Lionel Henry Churchill with a bullet wound in his forehead next to the partly-decomposed body of his wife. Doctors said the fifty-nine-year-old needed medical treatment at a mental hospital but magistrates disagreed and he was sent to prison for six months.

The number of failed suicide attempts known to police in 1956 amounted to 5,387 and of these 613 of them were prosecuted. Most were discharged, fined, or put on probation, but thirty-three were sent to prison.[14]

Suicide was de-criminalised in 1961, though it had never been criminalised in Scotland. Has decriminalisation led to a deceptive idea that assisted suicide is acceptable?

A Suicide Survivor

Kevin Hines photographed near the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. Photo by Cameron Hunt.

Nineteen-year-old Kevin Hines, who was bipolar and heard voices saying, “You have to die”, in 2000 survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. No one enquired if he needed help – a lady even asked him to take her photo. He regretted his decision as soon as he jumped, so prayed, “God, please save me”.  It is possible that a sea lion kept him afloat until he was rescued. He now travels the world sharing his message of hope, healing, and recovery under the hashtag #BeHereTomorrow.[15] He campaigned for the erection of suicide barriers on the bridge and prevention nets were put in place in January 2024.

The Perceived Value of Human Life

Presumably the cost of trying to rescue the passengers on the Titan submersible ran into millions of dollars[16]  but, a few days before, possibly hundreds died on an overcrowded vessel carrying migrants off Greece..[17]

A British nurse, Lucy Letby, was convicted in August 2023 of murdering seven babies on a neonatal unit and attempting to murder six more[18]  but babies of the viable gestation period required to survive are still allowed to be aborted.  

The Sunak government published in September 2023 a five-year cross-sector suicide prevention strategy.[19] The police may spend a long time trying to talk someone out of committing suicide. A police officer, Sergeant Graham Saville, in August 2023, died after being hit by a train whilst trying to help a person in difficulties on the track.[20] A few weeks later, the person returned to the scene, drunk, and threatened to take his life. He was arrested, pleaded guilty to causing a public nuisance, and was handed a three-year community order and to wear an alcohol monitoring tag for 120 days and ordered to attend thirty rehabilitation sessions.[21]

English Law on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

Both euthanasia and assisted suicide are illegal under English law. Assisted suicide is illegal under the terms of the Suicide Act (1961) and those found guilty of encouraging or assisting a suicide face up to fourteen years’ imprisonment.

Depending on the situation, euthanasia is regarded as either manslaughter or murder. The maximum penalty is life imprisonment. Euthanasia can be classified as voluntary when a person makes a conscious decision to die and asks for help to do so, OR termed non-voluntary when a person is unable to give their consent (for example, because they are in a coma), and another person takes the decision on their behalf, perhaps influenced by a previously-expressed intention for their lives to be ended in such circumstances.22

There were 187 cases referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) by the police from 1st April 2009 up to 31st March 2024 that were recorded as assisted suicide. However, of these, 127 were not proceeded with by the CPS and thirty-six cases were withdrawn by the police. 

There are currently six ongoing cases. Four cases of encouraging or assisting suicide have been successfully prosecuted. One case of assisted suicide was charged and acquitted after trial in May 2015 and eight cases were referred onwards for prosecution for homicide or other serious crime.[22]


(Part Two to follow next week).



ENDNOTES

[1] Taught by Professor Adrian Attard, OCD.

[2] Consider also the Nazi campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia.

[3] Michael Cholbi, “Suicide”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021), ed. Edward N. Zalta <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/suicide/>.

[4] Moral corruption of the mind (Laws, IX 854a3–5); by judicial order, as in the case of Socrates; “extreme and unavoidable personal misfortune”; “shame at having participated in grossly unjust actions” (Laws, IX 873c-d).

[5] Plato, Laws, IX 854a3–5.

[6] Augustine, City of God, 1.17–27, here 1.27.

[7] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1271, part II, Q64, A5.

[9] Letter of St Ignatius to the Romans, see the Second Reading for the Office of Readings on his feast day (17 October).

[10] St Teresa of Avila, Life, 1.4.

[11] <https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/death-dying/dying-and-death/burying/>.

[12] <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/sep/09/suicide-still-treated-as-a-in-at-least-20-countries-report-finds>.

[14] “When Suicide Was Illegal”, BBC, 3 August 2011 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14374296>.

[16] Titan imploded in June 2023 on a dive to see the wreckage of the Titanic.

[18] <https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/LETBY-Sentencing-Remarks.pdf>.

[19] Suicide Prevention in England: 5-Year Cross-Sector Strategy <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/suicide-prevention-strategy-for-england-2023-to-2028/suicide-prevention-in-england-5-year-cross-sector-strategy>.

[20] <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-66619728>.

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