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news > assisted suicide: legal aid

Assisted Suicide: Legal Aid

Assisted suicide: Guardian editorial on Lords ruling, Jul. 30, 2009.

The appellate committee of the House of Lords yesterday ended its own life with a final ruling which will affect the way others end theirs. The law lords, sitting as such for the last time before the new supreme court comes into being, heeded the pleas of the multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy, who has been seeking assurance that were her husband to travel with her to a Swiss clinic to end her own life, he would not face prosecution. The bold judgment requires the director of public prosecutions to spell out when he will and will not prosecute in cases involving the sort of assisted suicide which Ms Purdy envisages for herself. Some of the implications are disturbing, and there are important concerns about exactly how the ruling will work. On the principle, though, the law lords got it emphatically right.

Some objections to euthanasia amount to illiberal moralising, but some are profound. The sanctity of life is for the most part a civilising ideal, and one cherished by those medics who are deeply reluctant to get involved in causing death instead of saving life. Their warnings that terminal illnesses can be misdiagnosed deserves a respectful hearing, as do claims that relatives worn down by caring may apply indecent pressure, whether consciously or otherwise. Set against all this is the grim, painful and slow reality of so many deaths, a reality obscured by soft talk about "allowing nature to take its course". It is telling that the case against euthanasia is often pitched in terms of abstract principles, whereas the most persuasive arguments for reform start with a first-hand account of just what it is like to watch a real person suffer as they fade. Sometimes principles are held so dearly that no amount of experience can dislodge them, but opponents of reform should at least be able to see the holes in the logic of the status quo, which remain even after yesterday's ruling.

Until 1961 ending one's own life was illegal, although threatening failed suicides with jail is an absurdity to which virtually no one would want to return. Yet while most people are quite free to kill

themselves under the law, the same is not true of the unlucky minority who are too incapacitated to do so alone. Suicide is the only lawful act that it is illegal to conspire in, so those who need assistance in order to die – often the very same people who have the strongest reason for wanting to do so – face effective discrimination. When they demand the right to die, they are demanding no more than a right that everyone else already has.

While bold, yesterday's ruling is only a small step in starting to put that right. It means that those with the capacity – financial and physical – to travel to Switzerland should soon be able to do so accompanied by their loved ones without fear of criminalising them. Surely no one can think it better for them to travel out there alone, as is already legal. Nothing, however, will change for those who are too frail or too poor to make the same journey. The only answer for them is fuller-blooded reform to make a reality of the right to die comfortably within the UK itself. That can only be a job for parliament, as opposed to the judges.

Until parliament turns to the task, people mentally quite capable of making a choice will be unable to exercise it. Letting matters drift also carries more particular risks. Whatever threats the law made, Purdy-type cases were almost never prosecuted. Now that the DPP is obliged to spell out exactly when the public interest requires a prosecution, he could perversely force himself to take action more often. Even if not, the upshot is that he – rather than parliament – will effectively be making the law. The law lords were right to conclude that the uncertain threat hanging over families in the most desperate of circumstances is an unacceptable breach of the right to a private life. But now parliament, not the DPP, must tackle the central question: when is it acceptable to assist someone to die?

Editorial, The Guardian

"But now parliament ... must tackle the central question: when is it acceptable to assist someone to die?"