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'The Death Wish Beneath the Language': Expert uncovers truth behind assisted dying
Dr. Kevin Yuill, a self-described atheist and humanist, challenges the usual image of someone who opposes assisted suicide. He has spent more than a decade contending that the push for “assisted dying” is not an act of compassion towards those who suffer, but a disastrous effort to turn suicide into a medical option approved and facilitated by the state.
Yuill is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland, and chief executive of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (HAASE).
He believes the issue of assisted suicide raises the question of the meaning of human life, and who has the authority to take it.
Yuill argued that differentiating assisted dying from suicide has helped to hide the reality of what is actually happening.
Dr. Yuill does not treat assisted dying as a technical issue within medical ethics. For him, it raises a far more profound question: what a society believes human life is for, and who has the authority to decide when a life has become too painful, too expensive, or too burdensome to be worth continuing.
An emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland and chief executive of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (HAASE), Dr. Yuill told Live Action News, “I think there is a death wish amongst those clamoring for both euthanasia and assisted suicide.”
It is a provocative argument, and Dr. Yuill is fully aware of that. Yet, as he sees it, the real danger is not simply that some individuals may choose to die. It is that society may slowly come to view death as an answer to poverty, disability, loneliness, and poor care — and then dignify that change by labelling it as “choice.”
Dr. Yuill made this argument in his 2013 book, "Assisted Suicide: The Liberal, Humanist Case Against Legalisation," which maintained that the key issue in the public debate is suicide rather than euthanasia. Over 10 years later, he believes that the framing of the debate still fails to take hold, because it forces people to confront an uncomfortable truth.
“Mainstream media and politics deliberately try to play down the suggestion that ingesting deadly drugs is actually suicide,” he said. “Whereas they can support the idea that someone suffering at the end of life should be freed from their pain, they do not like to be confronted with the idea that they are facilitating suicide.”
For Dr. Yuill, the phrase “assisted dying” serves as a kind of moral laundering. The reframing shifts attention from the act itself — intentionally ingesting a substance meant to cause death — to the circumstances that lead up to it: illness, suffering, fear, and a perceived loss of control.
Dr. Yuill acknowledges that these circumstances call for compassion, but maintains that they do not change what is actually occurring.
“Most, though not all, recognize the wrongness of suicide,” he said. “That is why the language matters.”
His objection goes beyond wording. In his view, euthanasia and assisted suicide rest on the same grim premise: that human difficulties, whether medical or deeply personal, cannot be resolved through the support and intervention of others.
“Both destroy hope, such a necessary part of the human condition,” he said.
Furthermore, Dr. Yuill also sees an older impulse at work: efficiency. “I might alter what I said in 2013,” he explained, “because I think there is an impulse of efficiency that underlies the drive towards euthanasia since it was first suggested in 1870.”
From that perspective, assisted dying is not merely another expression of patient choice. It risks becoming the least expensive response to a society’s failure to deliver proper care.
Dr. Yuill’s resistance to assisted suicide does not rest on religious teaching. He identifies as an atheist, and HAASE was founded specifically to present a humanist argument against legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia. His case starts from the principle of autonomy.
In his 2015 article, “The Unfreedom of Assisted Suicide,” he argued that legalization can reduce autonomy by handing the role of “final judge” to the state. When asked for a current example, Dr. Yuil quoted guidance issued by the British Medical Association (BMA) on voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, known as VSED.
The BMA characterized VSED as a decision made by a mentally competent person, without coercion, to cease taking food and fluids by mouth in order to bring about their own death; its guidance is designed to help doctors support patients while remaining within the law. Dr. Yuill, however, interprets its practical consequences very differently.
“Doctors have been advised to resist giving food and/or drink to a patient in their care who is begging for it,” he said. “That is the state being the final judge of the patient’s will — the immediate desire to eat and drink or the earlier expressed desire to die.”
While he acknowledged that he does not regard VSED itself as suicide, he sees in the BMA guidance a disturbing inversion of medical duty: a patient’s present request for food or water may be superseded by an earlier declared wish to die.
“The doctor is in a position of power over the patient,” Dr. Yuill said.
He then offered a deliberately unsettling analogy: a woman who withdraws her consent to sex at the last moment, but is pressured to continue because she had agreed beforehand.
The comparison is stark, yet for Dr. Yuill, it makes a crucial point: consent expressed at one time cannot automatically override a person’s changed wishes at another.
As chief executive of HAASE, Dr. Yuill has helped assemble an unusually wide-ranging coalition in the United Kingdom opposed to assisted-dying legislation. His approach depends less on lawsuits or traditional lobbying than on political education: persistent, direct, and intentionally opposed to adopting the language used by supporters.
“Our success in the UK is down to refusing to bow down to the terminology invented by proponents,” he said. “Particularly, the argument that ingesting deadly drugs with the intent to die is somehow not suicide.”
HAASE also confronts what Dr. Yuill describes as scare tactics: the assertion that, without legal assisted dying, everyone is destined for a horrific death. The organization has commissioned its own surveys, contending that public backing declines once people grasp the specifics of proposed legislation. It has also placed Canada at the center of its case.
“We brought up the Canadian horror show relentlessly,” he said.
In 2016, Canada legalized medical assistance in dying, or MAID, initially restricting it to people whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable. In 2021, eligibility was widened to include those with grievous and irremediable medical conditions whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable, known as Track 2.
Critics, among them disability-rights campaigners, contend that this expansion has placed vulnerable people at risk of dying prematurely, and that safeguards have failed to develop quickly enough. Canada’s proposed expansion to people whose only underlying condition is mental illness has since been postponed indefinitely, with the government pointing to unresolved disagreements over eligibility criteria and safeguards.
To Dr. Yuill, however, this is not comforting. It is proof of his point.
“Canada illustrates how quickly ‘safeguards’ fall away,” he said. “Second, it enshrines EAS [euthanasia/assisted suicide] as a right rather than using the Dutch system, where it is more about the doctor making the decision. That means that the entire culture shifts.”
One of the most notable aspects of Dr. Yuill’s campaign is how wide-ranging it is. Among those he counts as allies are Reform UK, the Conservatives, Labour, the official publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain, born-again Christians, Muslims, Catholics, atheists, disability campaigners, and gender-critical feminists.
“A real motley crew,” he said, adding, “We simply concentrated on the bill presented before us, convincing those who favored EAS in theory about the laws in that particular legislation."
In his view, advocates of assisted dying gain an advantage when their opponents are fragmented or when the issue is kept out of public debate altogether. “We learned that the other side benefits from no debate,” he said, “so we debated the issue relentlessly.”
He saw the response as more than just pushback. It reflected an understanding that this matter went beyond conventional political boundaries.
“This issue is above politics,” he said.
The central promise of assisted-dying laws is that they will apply only to voluntary, informed, autonomous choices. Dr. Yuill does not doubt that some people sincerely request death. His concern is that the law cannot reliably distinguish a free request from one shaped by fear of being a burden.
“Coercion is remarkably hard to detect,” he said. “It depends on the abstract rights-bearing person rather than the reality of people with terrible choices to make being led down the path of EAS by circumstances.”
Rather than dwell on the legal definition, Dr. Yuill said to imagine who is actually affected: a senior citizen who feels like a liability to those around them; a disabled person surrounded by the message, stated or unstated, that death would be preferable to her condition; an autistic adult whose parents are gone and who has no one left.
“I cannot envision a safeguard that can actually express such things,” he said.
At its core, Dr. Yuill is arguing about something simple. Checks and balances take the form of forms, reviews, cooling-off periods, and signatures, while undue influence often seeps in through the general atmosphere of a community that prizes independence, disdains dependence, and gently suggests that certain people are too expensive to keep alive.
As Dr. Yuill noted that the language of dignity and burden has a history, and has noted resonances of early 20th-century eugenics in today’s assisted-dying campaigns. He does not suggest that advocates want such results; his point is that both outlooks can make a person’s worth hinge on circumstances.
“An EAS discussion broke out in many places in the early twentieth century,” he said. “The Soviet Union had a brief period where it legalized euthanasia, but soon revoked it after people wished to euthanize their elderly relatives.”
He recounted two episodes from Nazi Germany: the official propaganda stressing what it cost to support the mentally ill, and the resistance guided by Archbishop Clemens August von Galen. His outspoken condemnation of the killings ranks among the few instances in which opposition to Hitler’s policies succeeded.
“What all of these pre-war movements shared was a utilitarian view of the value of human life,” Dr. Yuill pointed out.
Advocates of assisted dying generally rely on a pair of ideals, individual “choice” and “compassion” toward the suffering. In Dr. Yuill’s view, the legal framework forces them apart rather than bringing them together.
“I’m not sure you can ever encapsulate compassion in law,” he said. “We cannot be compelled to be compassionate, and nor can law itself be compassionate — it provides rules.”
Compassion, when properly understood, is directed toward another person, while autonomy concerns a person’s decisions about himself. Those are not the same thing.
“If I am motivated by compassion, it is always concerning another person, whereas autonomy is about honouring the decisions an individual makes about himself,” he explained. “We might provide euthanasia to children on the basis of compassion, but we can never do so on the basis of autonomy.”
Such a difference is important because either rationale becomes hazardous when followed to its logical end. Compassion can slide into a justification for judging that someone else’s life has ceased to be worth living. Autonomy, if treated as absolute, might oblige society to grant every request for assistance in dying.
“Neither is a good justification for legalizing EAS,” he said.
Asked what he would prioritize instead, Dr. Yuill does not hesitate. “I would put hospice places at the top,” he said. “They do an incredible job.”
Dr. Yuill is encouraged that Prime Minister Andy Burnham has stressed enhancing palliative and social care before any assisted-suicide legislation is contemplated.
In Dr. Yuill’s eyes, the real choice is not between suffering and death. It is between a society that commits resources to care, companionship, pain management, disability support, and human dignity, and one that hands vulnerable people a deadly option and labels it liberty.
He then concluded with a warning that extends well past parliament, one directed at all who may find the comfortable rhetoric of choice appealing.
“The actual person involved might be like the abstract person who wants a chance,” he said, “but might also be an elderly person who feels like they are a burden.”
Live Action News is pro-life news and commentary from a pro-life perspective.
Our work is possible because of our donors. Please consider giving to further our work of changing hearts and minds on issues of life and human dignity.
Contact editor@liveaction.org for questions, corrections, or if you are seeking permission to reprint any Live Action News content.
Guest Articles: To submit a guest article to Live Action News, email editor@liveaction.org with an attached Word document of 800-1000 words. Please also attach any photos relevant to your submission if applicable. If your submission is accepted for publication, you will be notified within three weeks. Guest articles are not compensated (see our Open License Agreement). Thank you for your interest in Live Action News!
Bridget Sielicki
·
Analysis
Bridget Sielicki
·
Analysis
Cassy Cooke
·
Analysis
Cassy Cooke
·
Opinion
Cassy Cooke
·
Human Interest
Angeline Tan
·
Activism
Angeline Tan
·
International
Angeline Tan
·
Human Interest
Angeline Tan
·'The Death Wish Beneath the Language': Expert uncovers truth behind assisted dying
Dr. Kevin Yuill, a self-described atheist and humanist, challenges the usual image of someone who opposes assisted suicide. He has spent more than a decade contending that the push for “assisted dying” is not an act of compassion towards those who suffer, but a disastrous effort to turn suicide into a medical option approved and facilitated by the state.
Yuill is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland, and chief executive of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (HAASE).
He believes the issue of assisted suicide raises the question of the meaning of human life, and who has the authority to take it.
Yuill argued that differentiating assisted dying from suicide has helped to hide the reality of what is actually happening.
Dr. Yuill does not treat assisted dying as a technical issue within medical ethics. For him, it raises a far more profound question: what a society believes human life is for, and who has the authority to decide when a life has become too painful, too expensive, or too burdensome to be worth continuing.
An emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland and chief executive of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (HAASE), Dr. Yuill told Live Action News, “I think there is a death wish amongst those clamoring for both euthanasia and assisted suicide.”
It is a provocative argument, and Dr. Yuill is fully aware of that. Yet, as he sees it, the real danger is not simply that some individuals may choose to die. It is that society may slowly come to view death as an answer to poverty, disability, loneliness, and poor care — and then dignify that change by labelling it as “choice.”
Dr. Yuill made this argument in his 2013 book, "Assisted Suicide: The Liberal, Humanist Case Against Legalisation," which maintained that the key issue in the public debate is suicide rather than euthanasia. Over 10 years later, he believes that the framing of the debate still fails to take hold, because it forces people to confront an uncomfortable truth.
“Mainstream media and politics deliberately try to play down the suggestion that ingesting deadly drugs is actually suicide,” he said. “Whereas they can support the idea that someone suffering at the end of life should be freed from their pain, they do not like to be confronted with the idea that they are facilitating suicide.”
For Dr. Yuill, the phrase “assisted dying” serves as a kind of moral laundering. The reframing shifts attention from the act itself — intentionally ingesting a substance meant to cause death — to the circumstances that lead up to it: illness, suffering, fear, and a perceived loss of control.
Dr. Yuill acknowledges that these circumstances call for compassion, but maintains that they do not change what is actually occurring.
“Most, though not all, recognize the wrongness of suicide,” he said. “That is why the language matters.”
His objection goes beyond wording. In his view, euthanasia and assisted suicide rest on the same grim premise: that human difficulties, whether medical or deeply personal, cannot be resolved through the support and intervention of others.
“Both destroy hope, such a necessary part of the human condition,” he said.
Furthermore, Dr. Yuill also sees an older impulse at work: efficiency. “I might alter what I said in 2013,” he explained, “because I think there is an impulse of efficiency that underlies the drive towards euthanasia since it was first suggested in 1870.”
From that perspective, assisted dying is not merely another expression of patient choice. It risks becoming the least expensive response to a society’s failure to deliver proper care.
Dr. Yuill’s resistance to assisted suicide does not rest on religious teaching. He identifies as an atheist, and HAASE was founded specifically to present a humanist argument against legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia. His case starts from the principle of autonomy.
In his 2015 article, “The Unfreedom of Assisted Suicide,” he argued that legalization can reduce autonomy by handing the role of “final judge” to the state. When asked for a current example, Dr. Yuil quoted guidance issued by the British Medical Association (BMA) on voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, known as VSED.
The BMA characterized VSED as a decision made by a mentally competent person, without coercion, to cease taking food and fluids by mouth in order to bring about their own death; its guidance is designed to help doctors support patients while remaining within the law. Dr. Yuill, however, interprets its practical consequences very differently.
“Doctors have been advised to resist giving food and/or drink to a patient in their care who is begging for it,” he said. “That is the state being the final judge of the patient’s will — the immediate desire to eat and drink or the earlier expressed desire to die.”
While he acknowledged that he does not regard VSED itself as suicide, he sees in the BMA guidance a disturbing inversion of medical duty: a patient’s present request for food or water may be superseded by an earlier declared wish to die.
“The doctor is in a position of power over the patient,” Dr. Yuill said.
He then offered a deliberately unsettling analogy: a woman who withdraws her consent to sex at the last moment, but is pressured to continue because she had agreed beforehand.
The comparison is stark, yet for Dr. Yuill, it makes a crucial point: consent expressed at one time cannot automatically override a person’s changed wishes at another.
As chief executive of HAASE, Dr. Yuill has helped assemble an unusually wide-ranging coalition in the United Kingdom opposed to assisted-dying legislation. His approach depends less on lawsuits or traditional lobbying than on political education: persistent, direct, and intentionally opposed to adopting the language used by supporters.
“Our success in the UK is down to refusing to bow down to the terminology invented by proponents,” he said. “Particularly, the argument that ingesting deadly drugs with the intent to die is somehow not suicide.”
HAASE also confronts what Dr. Yuill describes as scare tactics: the assertion that, without legal assisted dying, everyone is destined for a horrific death. The organization has commissioned its own surveys, contending that public backing declines once people grasp the specifics of proposed legislation. It has also placed Canada at the center of its case.
“We brought up the Canadian horror show relentlessly,” he said.
In 2016, Canada legalized medical assistance in dying, or MAID, initially restricting it to people whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable. In 2021, eligibility was widened to include those with grievous and irremediable medical conditions whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable, known as Track 2.
Critics, among them disability-rights campaigners, contend that this expansion has placed vulnerable people at risk of dying prematurely, and that safeguards have failed to develop quickly enough. Canada’s proposed expansion to people whose only underlying condition is mental illness has since been postponed indefinitely, with the government pointing to unresolved disagreements over eligibility criteria and safeguards.
To Dr. Yuill, however, this is not comforting. It is proof of his point.
“Canada illustrates how quickly ‘safeguards’ fall away,” he said. “Second, it enshrines EAS [euthanasia/assisted suicide] as a right rather than using the Dutch system, where it is more about the doctor making the decision. That means that the entire culture shifts.”
One of the most notable aspects of Dr. Yuill’s campaign is how wide-ranging it is. Among those he counts as allies are Reform UK, the Conservatives, Labour, the official publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain, born-again Christians, Muslims, Catholics, atheists, disability campaigners, and gender-critical feminists.
“A real motley crew,” he said, adding, “We simply concentrated on the bill presented before us, convincing those who favored EAS in theory about the laws in that particular legislation."
In his view, advocates of assisted dying gain an advantage when their opponents are fragmented or when the issue is kept out of public debate altogether. “We learned that the other side benefits from no debate,” he said, “so we debated the issue relentlessly.”
He saw the response as more than just pushback. It reflected an understanding that this matter went beyond conventional political boundaries.
“This issue is above politics,” he said.
The central promise of assisted-dying laws is that they will apply only to voluntary, informed, autonomous choices. Dr. Yuill does not doubt that some people sincerely request death. His concern is that the law cannot reliably distinguish a free request from one shaped by fear of being a burden.
“Coercion is remarkably hard to detect,” he said. “It depends on the abstract rights-bearing person rather than the reality of people with terrible choices to make being led down the path of EAS by circumstances.”
Rather than dwell on the legal definition, Dr. Yuill said to imagine who is actually affected: a senior citizen who feels like a liability to those around them; a disabled person surrounded by the message, stated or unstated, that death would be preferable to her condition; an autistic adult whose parents are gone and who has no one left.
“I cannot envision a safeguard that can actually express such things,” he said.
At its core, Dr. Yuill is arguing about something simple. Checks and balances take the form of forms, reviews, cooling-off periods, and signatures, while undue influence often seeps in through the general atmosphere of a community that prizes independence, disdains dependence, and gently suggests that certain people are too expensive to keep alive.
As Dr. Yuill noted that the language of dignity and burden has a history, and has noted resonances of early 20th-century eugenics in today’s assisted-dying campaigns. He does not suggest that advocates want such results; his point is that both outlooks can make a person’s worth hinge on circumstances.
“An EAS discussion broke out in many places in the early twentieth century,” he said. “The Soviet Union had a brief period where it legalized euthanasia, but soon revoked it after people wished to euthanize their elderly relatives.”
He recounted two episodes from Nazi Germany: the official propaganda stressing what it cost to support the mentally ill, and the resistance guided by Archbishop Clemens August von Galen. His outspoken condemnation of the killings ranks among the few instances in which opposition to Hitler’s policies succeeded.
“What all of these pre-war movements shared was a utilitarian view of the value of human life,” Dr. Yuill pointed out.
Advocates of assisted dying generally rely on a pair of ideals, individual “choice” and “compassion” toward the suffering. In Dr. Yuill’s view, the legal framework forces them apart rather than bringing them together.
“I’m not sure you can ever encapsulate compassion in law,” he said. “We cannot be compelled to be compassionate, and nor can law itself be compassionate — it provides rules.”
Compassion, when properly understood, is directed toward another person, while autonomy concerns a person’s decisions about himself. Those are not the same thing.
“If I am motivated by compassion, it is always concerning another person, whereas autonomy is about honouring the decisions an individual makes about himself,” he explained. “We might provide euthanasia to children on the basis of compassion, but we can never do so on the basis of autonomy.”
Such a difference is important because either rationale becomes hazardous when followed to its logical end. Compassion can slide into a justification for judging that someone else’s life has ceased to be worth living. Autonomy, if treated as absolute, might oblige society to grant every request for assistance in dying.
“Neither is a good justification for legalizing EAS,” he said.
Asked what he would prioritize instead, Dr. Yuill does not hesitate. “I would put hospice places at the top,” he said. “They do an incredible job.”
Dr. Yuill is encouraged that Prime Minister Andy Burnham has stressed enhancing palliative and social care before any assisted-suicide legislation is contemplated.
In Dr. Yuill’s eyes, the real choice is not between suffering and death. It is between a society that commits resources to care, companionship, pain management, disability support, and human dignity, and one that hands vulnerable people a deadly option and labels it liberty.
He then concluded with a warning that extends well past parliament, one directed at all who may find the comfortable rhetoric of choice appealing.
“The actual person involved might be like the abstract person who wants a chance,” he said, “but might also be an elderly person who feels like they are a burden.”
Live Action News is pro-life news and commentary from a pro-life perspective.
Our work is possible because of our donors. Please consider giving to further our work of changing hearts and minds on issues of life and human dignity.
Contact editor@liveaction.org for questions, corrections, or if you are seeking permission to reprint any Live Action News content.
Guest Articles: To submit a guest article to Live Action News, email editor@liveaction.org with an attached Word document of 800-1000 words. Please also attach any photos relevant to your submission if applicable. If your submission is accepted for publication, you will be notified within three weeks. Guest articles are not compensated (see our Open License Agreement). Thank you for your interest in Live Action News!
Bridget Sielicki
·Analysis
Bridget Sielicki
·Analysis
Cassy Cooke
·Analysis
Cassy Cooke
·Opinion
Cassy Cooke
·Human Interest
Angeline Tan
·Activism
Angeline Tan
·International
Angeline Tan
·Human Interest
Angeline Tan
·