Assisted suicide - or murder?
29/02/2008
Sarah Wootton (story linked below) makes a bad argument sound almost reasonable, but it’s a bad argument all the same. So-called assisted suicide makes someone else into a killer; whatever the law may or may not allow, you cannot in all conscience ask that of anybody. Even military personnel asked to kill may return home full of remorse, ending their trauma through suicide, or remaining unfit to lead fulfilling or useful lives.
Thirty years after the end of hostilities, a Gentleman of the Road admitted to me that what had ruined him was going into Dresden to mop up after the bombing. A Falklands war veteran hanged himself from a lampost.
The advocates of euthanasia seem to want to put loved ones, spouses and doctors in civilian life under similar stress, and for what? A carefully reasoned ethic in accordance with the best principles from the best legal minds? I doubt it. The law is in place to protect the otherwise unprotected, not to make James Bonds of the population at large.
The other problem is with ‘safeguards’. A bad law is one that cannot be policed, and how on earth are you to see inside the minds and motives of the so-called ‘mercy killers’, to weed out the opportunists, the givers of false information and the perverted who enjoy killing for its own sake? Recent prosecutions show that a Harold Shipman can be brought to justice, but it takes only one successful forgery of a document to turn an ordinary murder into a ‘mercy killing’.
Presumably the advocates of euthanasia don’t much mind if a few people get killed by mistake. Death is preferred to life – others (indeed anyone) can finish off patients with impunity. That is the illogical travesty of the principle of good law that lies at the root of the pro-euthanasia argument.
Joseph Biddulph, South Wales