Has the assisted dying lobby considered the guillotine? | The Spectator

Charles Moore

My young friend Dr Cajetan Skowkronski has helped me resolve a question that has been worrying me. Why do supporters of ‘assisted dying’ insist that the best method is a cocktail of pills (or intravenous injection)? Their prescription has an air of medical respectability, but this is not a medical process. The sole aim in assisting suicide is to achieve the quickest, least painful death. In a Twitter thread of Swiftian brilliance, Dr Skowkronski has the answer: ‘At the height of the French Revolution,’ he writes, ‘when large volumes of Assisted Deaths were taking place for the sake of noble aims, a compassionate physician, Dr Guillotin, felt that many of the prevailing methods were cruel. [He] therefore proposed the use of an accurate and immediate method which spares the “patients” so many of the regrettable sufferings associated with other therapeutic options such as hanging, shooting, axing, burning or dismemberment.’ After ‘extensive trials’ in France, this ‘was adopted in many progressive countries’.

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Charles Moore is The Spectator’s chairman.

He is a former editor of the magazine, as well as the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph. He became a non-affiliated peer in July 2020.

Charles Moore

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