Britain’s House of Lords may no longer feature the famous peers of the past—Pitt the Elder, Salisbury, the Duke of Wellington—and its government may no longer sit at the center of an empire. Americans therefore do not pay attention to its proceedings. But a recent debate that has unfolded in that house is worth reviewing, as it reveals that the biblical heritage of the West has not yet entirely disappeared across the Atlantic.
The debate concerned what is known as the “Terminally Ill Adults Bill,” which was introduced in the House of Commons in 2024. The law would allow a patient who has been given six months to live to end his life with the assistance of a doctor or other medical figure. While Prime Minister Keir Starmer supported the law, he did not make it a part of his party’s legislative agenda. So members of Parliament were free to vote their conscience. Having passed the Commons by a significant margin, it has met with real opposition in the Lords from many of its members, including Theresa May, the former prime minister, and some of the prominent Jewish members of the House.
One longtime Jewish member of the House of Lords is no longer there; Rabbi Jonathan Sacks passed away in 2023. At that point, he was not only the most prominent Judaic presence in the English-speaking world; one might argue that he was the most influential defender of the biblical moral tradition in Europe. And while his voice is no longer heard in the golden and gilded hall in the Palace of Westminster, there is no question what he would have said had he still lived. In 2006, a similar bill was introduced in Britain, and Sacks, then chief rabbi, eloquently inveighed against it in the Times of London. Writing movingly of his father’s last moments, Rabbi Sacks reflected how Judaism saw life itself as a gift. Yet most striking about his presentation was the fact that his argument rested not only on Jewish tradition, but on one of the most prominent non-rabbinic thinkers of our age.
Sacks cited Friedrich Hayek, himself spiritually agnostic, who had warned that choices are often made in history that seemed small at the time but that actually had enormous consequences. Hayek, Sacks explained, “held that the simplest way of avoiding catastrophe is to keep to a few simple rules—rules that have proved their worth by ensuring the survival of cultures that kept them. By far the longest-lived cultures are the great world faiths, and their rules are often in the form of basic prohibitions: ‘Thou shalt not.’” Sacks then explained the relevance of this point:
To legalize assisted dying is fraught with dangers, chief of which is the deconsecration of life. The history of societies that have sanctioned euthanasia in the past is not an encouraging one. In part, Judaism and Christianity were protests against ages in which human life was held dispensable and disposable.
Those who propose the current Bill do so from the highest of motives. But purity of motive has never ensured rightness of outcomes; often it has been the reverse. To give the dying dignity, using all possible means to treat their pain is one thing. To allow medically assisted suicide is another. If we lose our reverence for human life we will one day lose much else besides.
During the 2025 debate, Sacks’s final sentences were cited in the House of Lords by a peer who knew him well: Stuart Polak, a member of Britain’s Orthodox Jewish community and one of Israel’s most prominent defenders in the Lords. “My Lords,” Polak reflected, “the words of Lord Sacks should once again ring loudly and clearly today as they did in 2006.” But the most devastating and affecting words were Polak’s own. “I speak,” he said, “out of a deep and abiding concern for the society we are shaping, for the values we hold, and for the vulnerable whom we are duty bound to protect; and, my Lords, I speak as someone who was given six months to live 37 years ago.” In a single phrase, Polak captured all that is wrong about the bill—both the way in which it will make the vulnerable feel like burdens, and the seeming infallibility it grants the predictions of doctors.
What is striking about Sacks’s words, written 20 years ago, and cited by Polak in the present, is how prescient they were and how vindicated they have become. One need only look to another country ruled by Charles III to see that this is so: Canada. There, too, a law permitting assisted suicide was passed, originally limited to the terminally ill. This was then extended by Canada’s courts, in the name of egalitarianism, to those far beyond the mortally ill.
The horrors that have unfolded there in the recent past have been revealed by the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Alexander Raiken and succinctly summarized by Nicholas Tomaino in the Wall Street Journal, who tells us that “what was meant to be exceptional has become routine.” Petitions for assisted death have been approved for patients with “vision/hearing loss,” as well as “diabetes.” Canadian journalists have revealed how hospital “ethicists” have urged patients to end their lives. Tomaino cited Charles Krauthammer in contrast, whose own reflections are worth revisiting now that New York’s governor has announced that she will sign a similar bill into law: “When you see someone on a high ledge ready to jump, you are enjoined by every norm in our society to tackle him and pull him back from the abyss.”
As I read those words, I recalled how Sacks would wryly tell the tale of a parliamentarian who stood in the legislature and inveighed: “Yesterday, our country stood at the edge of a great abyss; but today, we have taken a great step forward.” The anecdote reminds us how often steps taken in the name of forward-thinking progress actually mark a catastrophic descent into dystopia. Pondering countries like Canada, Lord Polak asked in the Lords what happens “when the line once thought so firm, fades:”
What message do we send to the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill, when the law declares their lives not worth living? Will they not feel a quiet obligation to leave their families, to save resources, to cease being a burden? My Lords, that is not compassion, it is quiet cruelty masked as choice. Rather than offering death, let us commit to better palliative care.… Lord Sacks said life is sacred, it is God’s gift, not ours. It is the physician’s responsibility to heal, not to harm. Jewish law, halakha, teaches that every moment of life, even in suffering, has value, every breath is a blessing. We are not absolute owners of our lives, we are the guardians.… Enshrining this bill into law risks turning the immeasurable sanctity of life, kedushat ha-hayyim, into something to be weighed, measured, and judged.
Thanks to the opposition of numerous lords, and the many amendments they have offered, the bill has stalled in the House of Lords. If it is not passed before the end of the parliamentary session, it will die. There are those who have argued in England that unelected lords stopping a bill that has passed Parliament is undemocratic. This, as the Lords might say, is utter tosh. It is, one might further argue, codswallop. The House of Lords in its current form exists for just such a moment. If it no longer features only descendants of viscounts and marquesses, that is, in theory, so that distinguished Britons of all walks of life can offer the wisdom of their own experience.
In this case, they have done so. And considering the wise warnings of the Late Lord Sacks, Western civilization will owe these lords a debt of gratitude for having assisted in bringing about its death.
Photo: Peter Nicholls/Getty Images
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