Easter weekend for Episcopalians was saturated with secular news reports on Terri Schiavo and related right-to-die issues. Meanwhile in Great Britain, the Archbishop of Canterbury said recently that the Church remains unequivocally opposed to euthanasia and cannot support “right to die” legislation before Parliament.

Writing in the Times of London on Jan. 20, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams stated there was no “right to die.” Euthanasia implies “that life at a certain level of suffering or incapacity could no longer be lived in relation to God,” a proposition the Church rejects, for the “worth of human life,” he stated, “cannot be mortgaged to how any individual feels.”

Archbishop Williams’ comments came four days after remarks made by Prof. Robin Gill of the University of Kent. Speaking before a parliamentary committee hearing on assisted dying for the terminally ill, Canon Gill, an ethicist and advisor to Archbishop Williams, said the state should not prosecute those who facilitate suicide.

“There is a very strong compassionate case for voluntary euthanasia,” Canon Gill told one British newspaper, adding that in some cases “there is an overwhelming case for it.”

Dr. Williams rejected this argument, writing, “Euthanasia is best defined as the initiating of a process whose explicit primary aim is to end life. It is not the same as continuing a medical process whose long-term effect may reduce the span of life, nor is it the same as embarking on a treatment that offers short-term relief at the cost of possibly accelerating overall decline.”

Suicide is not merely a private affair, Archbishop Williams stated. We live “in relation — to others and to a society. At the simplest level, what often most shocks and grieves people who have been close to a suicide is the feeling that someone who has killed himself did not know what he really meant to his friends or family, did not know that he was loved and valued.”

Archbishop Williams endorsed palliative care and “the right to be spared avoidable pain,” but cautioned, “once that has mutated into a right to expect assistance in dying, the responsibility of others is involved, as is the whole question of what society is saying about life and its possible meanings.”

The 1998 Lambeth Conference noted that withholding excessive medical treatment when there is no “reasonable prospect of recovery” was consistent with Christian principles, a position also shared by the Standing Committee on National Concerns report to the 73rd General Convention in 2000 which rejected euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, saying “suicide is never a private self-regarding act.”