The conviction of Joanne Hill for the murder of her daughter was thoroughly deserved. Her callous actions deserved the utmost condemnation and have made me very angry and upset. Out of embarrassment that her daughter Naomi had mild cerebral palsy, requiring her to use calipers to walk, she drowned her in the bath, holding her under water for over five minutes.

I don’t need to use calipers to walk, but like Naomi, I too have mild cerebral palsy. Like Naomi, I too attended mainstream schools. I cannot understand why her mother should be ‘embarrassed’ by her daughter. Her father, speaking emotionally after the trial ended, was clearly not. Naomi’s cerebral palsy in no way affected her intellectual capacity, nor would it have prevented her leading a full and active life. Even if it did, that would have been no excuse. We have, sadly, no idea how she could have fulfilled her potential. We will never know.

Joanne Hill’s murderous actions illuminate a much wider and troubling debate – one about the value of life. In her supposed ‘embarrassment’, Ms Hill was actually suggesting that her daughter’s life was not worth living, and that it had no value for its own sake. Just a week ago, the eminent philosopher Baroness Warnock suggested that patients with dementia such as Alzheimer’s should be prepared to die because the burdens their living imposed outweighed any ‘benefits’.

But we can never see human life as a mathematical equation. Negatives and positives cannot, and must not, be calculated so as to decide if a life is worth living. It is a slippery, utilitarian approach. The arguments for euthanasia are being made ever more forcefully. People are clamouring to end lives that they no longer feel are worth living because of the pain they are in, perhaps, or the burden they feel they place on family. If that is what they feel, then that is what they feel – not being in that position, I cannot share what they feel that leads them to that conclusion. But if we were to allow people to take their own life on the basis that they felt they had become a burden, then we are taking a significant step. As a society, we would be saying that life may not be worth living after all. And how long will it be before someone feels they “ought” to endtheir lives  because they feel they have become a burden, even though they may privately feel that their life still meant something? It is an exploration of a slippery slope that we should not embark upon.

Life is always worth living because life is a concept which is not owned by a single person. In the end, our lives are not our own, because society has placed a value on our life. It is why suicides were always buried outside the cemetery gates. By accepting that a life can have no value, society is immediately provoking a debate about what makes life worth living. If we are no longer deemed worthwhile, then the risk is that society will put pressure on the vulnerable to ‘do the decent thing’. Except it is not decent, it is inhumane and cruel. 

Any one who wants a vision of where Baroness Warnock’s logic may lead us should go and read Michael Burleigh’s startling, troubling but academically mindblowing account of euthanasia in Nazi Germany entitled “Death and Deliverance”.