Eighteen Days to Die.

How we lost respect for life, from birth to death and beyond.

Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does.

Each week brings another step into a culture that has stopped valuing human life. I have said before that we are living in a death cult, and the evidence keeps mounting. We no longer respect human life or cherish it, let alone any sense of its sanctity. I feel a grief deep in my bones. It is heartbreaking that we have reached this point.

Here are three examples, from birth and death to beyond.

First, abortion is now effectively decriminalised until full term. The horror is plain: a woman can abort a baby at any point, for any reason, right up to nine months, without fear of punishment. Now the SNP proposes that abortion on the basis of sex should be allowed. We know what that leads to — baby girls are aborted in cultures which prefer boys to girls. It has happened in India and China, where the resulting demographic imbalance has warped their societies. It is staggering to see supposed feminists argue that a woman’s right to abortion at any stage of the pregnancy for any reason is desirable, even though it will mean many baby girls not being born. When a culture that once valued the individual weakens, it is inevitably pushed aside by cultures that do not value the individual at all, but are strong through sheer force and will.

What next? Will we argue for the rights of families to inflict Female Genital Mutilation on their daughters? Or the right of parents to leave unwanted baby girls at the dump? What is the meaningful difference between aborting a female foetus and murdering a baby girl? The reality is not much, aside from a few short weeks.

Second, there is the Assisted Dying Bill, which has now rejected more vital safeguards than can be counted here. Worse, new amendments are creeping in. One amendment tabled by Lord Birt and Lord Pannick proposes that the day after a doctor raises the option of ending your life, you must be assigned a personal navigator by an Assisted Dying help service. They would like to mandate a maximum timeline of 30 days or 18 days to death.

Eighteen days. There is no cooling-off period for someone reeling from a terminal diagnosis, and we know how inaccurate those diagnoses can be. Esther Rantzen is Exhibit A. And 18 days hardly allows clinicians to consider whether someone needs suicide prevention or suicide assistance.

But let’s be honest: suicide prevention will be for the birds if this bill passes. The NHS cannot pretend to prevent suicide while also promoting and fast-tracking it. It cannot be committed to preserving life and restoring health while running parallel machinery to end lives early.

I have tried to be balanced about the Assisted Dying Bill because I sympathise deeply with people who are terminally ill and suffering. Yet no such personal navigator exists for anything else you might present with: birth, cancer, Parkinsons, Alzheimers, major surgery, you name it. It is extraordinary that this level of bureaucratic zeal is reserved only for ushering people to death.

Frankly, at this stage it seems the bill’s proponents want to kill people off as quickly as possible.

Another amendment proposes screening patients at A&E for a quick death pathway. I will think very carefully before taking a loved one to A&E in future. My mother was given one to five years to live in 2013. She is still alive today. Imagine an elderly person with some cognitive decline, in pain or distress, taken to A&E. Imagine them being asked if they want assistance ending their life. And imagine the whole thing being over in eighteen days. Or imagine someone else takes them to A&E — you might not even know they were assisted in dying until after the fact.

Third, the final insult to the meaning and value of life. Calum Worthy, co-founder of the 2wai app, asked on X: ‘What if the loved ones we’ve lost could be part of our future?’ The company appears to be planning to offer mourners an AI surrogate of their dead loved ones through an app.

At present the app offers AI avatars of fictional people and historic figures. The great William Shakespeare is reduced to a digital marionette as 2wai cashes in on his genius. This is cheap enough, but what has gone wrong when a human being would settle for an Uncanny Valley copy of someone they loved?

2wai promotional video

We are not supposed to escape our grief. It is visceral, it howls, it lasts longer than we could ever imagine — and it is the price we pay for love. Grief is love. But the cure for grief is to grieve, not to seek shallow solace in the cold blue light of an AI simulacrum.

And 2wai proposes the wrong answer to the right question.

Perhaps our loved ones are part of our future in the afterlife. For people of faith, many of the bleak conundrums of our age make more sense as faith illuminates the way — life has value at birth, at death and after.

But equally you do not need religion to understand that human life matters nor to recognise that our dead loved ones leave lasting traces in our lives, without an app. Many humanists and atheists have built ethical systems based on human dignity, reason, compassion and the irreducible worth of the individual. You can reject any belief in an afterlife, yet still fiercely defend the preciousness of life and the moral duty of the living to care for one another.

Yet things are not at their worst. History shows we have seen darker times. Human beings as collateral damage is nothing new. The Aztecs tore the hearts from thousands in ritual sacrifice. Communist China and the Soviet Union killed millions in famines, purges and labour camps. Britain once executed people for theft or forgery. In the orphanages of the past, death was so common that children were effectively counted as losses in a ledger.

Humans drift into death cults with predictable regularity. History and fiction alike show it: we are treated as raw material, units, flesh to be used, discarded when inconvenient. We cannot fight death. We all die. Death is part of life.

Yet recognising that death is inevitable does not mean we must surrender to a culture that devalues life while we are alive. The choice is ours, collectively and individually, to reassert the worth of each human being. To see every child, every patient, every loved one not as a statistic, collateral damage, a pathway or a phone toy, but as a life to be protected, nurtured, and celebrated.

Reverence for life is not sentimental. It is a moral imperative. It is the only counter to the bureaucracies, technologies, and ideologies that treat humans as disposable. It is the only response to the rush toward expediency, to the fast-tracking of death.

We must remember that grief, suffering, and care are the measures of our humanity. To grieve is to love; to care is to insist that life matters. Every act of attention, compassion, and defence of life is a rebellion against the death cult that surrounds us.

So yes, we die. But how we live offers true sanctuary for human dignity, from birth to death and beyond. We must revere life.