Hopes and fears raised by legalising assisted suicide

PEOPLE who are terminally ill, with less than 12 months to live, should have the option of assisted suicide, according to a report published today by the Commission on Assisted Dying, chaired by former Labour Lord Chancellor Charles Falconer. And those who help them should enjoy legal protection. Some commentators have welcomed the report as a way to reduce unnecessary suffering, while others warn that it could make suicide routine.
 
Report helps define guidelines

The last stages of life can involve unbearable indignity and suffering, says an editorial in The Times. The desire to relieve suffering comes from a noble motive, but it is important that if the moral boundary is crossed, "it should be done with the greatest care".
 
The best service that the commission has done is to define conditions under which assisted dying would be permitted, adds the editorial. The safeguards need to be robust and the definitions of terminal illness need to be narrow. But if the conditions are met, then "to allow individuals sovereignty over their own futures is to allow them something that is rightly theirs".

So who would qualify under the assisted dying guidelines, asks Nick Tiggle on BBC News. The commission has been quite clear that a person would have to be terminally ill, defining that as a patient who has less than 12 months to live. They should also be acting "under their own steam and not be mentally impaired in any way".

In practice this means that dementia patients would not be eligible, including the author Terry Pratchett, who helped to fund the commission, adds Tiggle. "Those in the final year of the condition would not be considered mentally fit enough".

Dangerous territory

Let's be clear, the commission is not an impartial public body, says an editorial in the Daily Mail. Its chair, Lord Falconer (above), led an attempt to bring an assisted dying Bill in the Lords three years ago. So even before it began its deliberations "it was likely to favour bringing in a law that would allow doctors to help kill their patients".

At a quick glance, the report also reveals how dangerous and fraught turning its guidelines into law would be, adds the Mail. Of course there are exceptional cases of suffering, where authorities show leniency. But if assisted suicide becomes legal, "isn't the danger it will become routine?"

No political leaders have publicly backed scrapping the laws against assisted suicide, says Martin Beckford in The Daily Telegraph, "not least because it would prompt claims that the Government wanted to kill off the elderly and ill at a time of cutbacks in health and social care".

The inquiry itself admits the legalisation would create a "real risk" of pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives, says Beckford, either from family members "or a sense that they were a burden on society".
 
Change would end suffering

Commission chairman Charles Falconer says in The Guardian: "We have listened to the legitimate fears about the effect a change in the law might have." That is why the proposed law would only extend the right of an assisted suicide to someone who was terminally ill.
 
Falconer's commission considered whether it would be better to simply leave the law as it is, and allow the current fear of prosecution to act as the safeguard. But it was judged a better solution to offer protection for vulnerable people, while providing an alternative to the incoherence and "unnecessary pain that the current laws impose on dying people and their families". ·