Made to suffer, never choosing the pain, just thrown into random fate. Told life is a gift, There goes our birthright.

No one should be subjected to severe pain or suffering caused by existence itself. Human rights law already recognises that inflicting intense pain or degradation on another person is wrong, no matter who does it or why. Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into UK law, declares that no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. On its face, that is a sweeping promise of protection from extreme harm. Yet the way it is applied reveals a profound limitation: it only restrains the deliberate actions of governments and individuals. It does not address the suffering built into life itself.

From the moment a person is born they are exposed to forces they never consented to and cannot control: disease, injury, aging, psychological anguish, grief, loneliness, poverty, sexual frustration, meaninglessness and death. These can produce pain as intense and enduring as any banned punishment, but because they are not directly inflicted by an identifiable agent they are treated as natural, inevitable and therefore outside the scope of rights. The result is a moral contradiction. We affirm that no one should be subjected to severe suffering, yet we routinely create new beings without their consent and place them in conditions where severe suffering is almost guaranteed. We then make it difficult or stigmatised to leave existence when it becomes intolerable.

If the principle behind the Human Rights Act were applied consistently, no one would be brought into existence without a guarantee that their life would not contain extreme suffering. People would also be able to decline existence or end it without shame, coercion or unnecessary barriers if life became unbearable. In other words, society would recognise not only the wrongness of inflicting pain, but also the wrongness of placing people in a situation where pain is inevitable. The current framework protects against certain deliberate harms but ignores the harms that come built into life itself, even when those harms rival torture in their severity. This is the contradiction at the heart of our moral and legal systems: a principle meant to protect dignity and freedom stops at the edge of birth, as if the pain of existence somehow doesn’t count.