Assisted Suicide or Murder?
Ray Gosling’s story has been all over the papers this week, raising similar questions to Terry Pratchett’s very touching lecture delivered by Tony Robinson
The Jubilee Centre is about to publish a different point of view:
Later this year the Jubilee Centre will be publishing a new Cambridge Paper on assisted suicide and euthanasia by John Wyatt, Professor of Ethics & Perinatology at University College London and author of Matters of Life and Death: Human Dilemmas in the Light of the Christian Faith. In it he will warn that if euthanasia – or what is euphemistically referred to as ‘mercy killing’ – is accepted as a moral and legal part of medical practice, it will be both logically and practically impossible to prevent its gradual extension to voluntary euthanasia of those who wish to die, even if they are not terminally ill, and to the involuntary euthanasia of those whose lives seem futile and pain-filled.
These aren’t easy questions to answer, but they are very important ones. I sympathise very much with Terry Pratchett’s arguments, but I would want to be very sure that any law allowing for personal choice wouldn’t be open to the kind of abuses suggested above. I look forward to seeing what Prof. Wyatt’s arguments are.
Watch here for developments: Jubilee Centre – Blog
3 Responses to “Assisted Suicide or Murder?”
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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I don’t have much time for slippery slope arguments – I think if it is made legal only in certain cases, then it is legal only in certain cases. That at least would make things clear cut. There is obviously a lot of sympathy out there for the Terry Pratchett line – this isn’t presumably just from atheists who think people are no better than animals, as some would have us believe.
The difficulty is that death wishes often have a psychiatric dimension and it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish that wish as a perfectlyintelligible response to the gut-wrenching awfulness of one’s predicament or (as much empirical evidence indicates) the consequence of treatable depression after which one’s perspective on one’s situation changes. As psychiatry is still somewhat of a ‘bioethical ugly duckling’, and the time-frames for establishing a settled intention to die for legislative purposes in those jurisdictions that have legalised assisted death exceedingly short, I am not at all sympathetic towards the pro-liberalisation lobby. Incidentally, in Oregon, where physician-assisted suicide is legalised, patients are having great difficulty eliciting public funding for palliative care because assisted suicide is an available and cheaper option.
Tony B, I am afraid that the slippery slope is all to real – we were promised that abortion would only be allowed for strictly medical reasons but it has become abortion on demand without a change in the law. However that doesn’t make me totally opposed to a change in the law about assisted suicide just aware of the problems.