Aug. 7th, 2009

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As I was on the way to work a few weeks ago, the train I was on came to an unexpected halt. I looked out of the windows on both sides, but it was as I'd feared - we weren't at a station and that could only mean that the railways were buggered up again. The driver came over the tannoy and apologised but he didn't have any reason as to why we'd been stopped, and it was only after an hour of sitting there reading, playing golf on my phone, twiddling my thumbs and wondering how long it would be before the stouter people in my carriage resorted to cannibalism in lieu of McDonalds that we were told the reason; apparently a suicidal passer-by had taken the opportunity to vault nimbly in front of the train ahead of us, and we could expect a long wait whilst the police collected all the bits together for identification.
As and when I pop my clogs I hope my obituary is more positive than the collected irritation and contempt displayed by my fellow passengers. An elderly lady a few seats away summed up the general feeling quite well: "If they'd only gone to that clinic in Switzerland", she said, "they'd've saved everyone a lot of trouble."

With the recent deaths of Sir Edward Downes and his wife at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland and the recent announcement by Jack Straw that he was requesting the Director of Public Prosecutions to make a statement 'clarifying the law' on assisted suicide (leaving aside the embarrassment of our elected representative publicly passing the buck to civil servants on difficult issues), the right to die is back in the news. A poll carried out last week suggests that some 75% of the population support the legalisation of assisted suicide, but I'm still unconvinced.
The current system on assisted suicide which the UK has is one of 'don't ask, don't tell'; everyone knows it's illegal, but then again everyone knows that sometimes doctors slip a bit too much morphine into the syringe and, in the main, there aren't many complaints about this unless the doctor gets a bit carried away and overdoes it. Overall, this system has worked pretty well until now (with obvious, Harold Shipmman-shaped, exceptions) and it does give a clear mechanism of law for what to do when things do go wrong.

The moral grounds of changing the law to legalise assisted suicide are considerably shakier than might first appear as well. Where is the line to be drawn? People who have X wrong with them can choose to die, but people with Y cannot? Who is to decide on deserving cases, and on what legal grounds are those cases to be made? If a person has to be of 'sound mind' to opt for assisted suicide, then how could anyone opt for it when suicidal impulses and desires for death are amongst the foremost in the diagnostic criteria for mental illness? On the other hand if someone has to show severe depression and a desire for death, then the law would equally cover that 19 year old goth who hates you all and wants to die.
Perhaps of most concern is that people with severe, long term illness are the weakest and most vulnerable, and I don't think it's possible for anyone to take a disinterested position regarding the death of a near friend or relative. The complexity of human relationships is such that a dispassionate view is impossible and the danger of those vulnerable people being put into an untenable position is a very real one.

The thing which I find most worrying of all about this debate is that it effectively mandates the power of life and death into the hands of a third party and I can see no argument whatsoever that any organisation, public or private, should have that power over people outside of times of war. Let's face it, the state has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot be trusted with your phone number - blithely assuming that 'appropriate safeguards' (I'm learning the terminology) will ensure that the law is applied only in cases of need and compassion is kinda frightening to me and I'm prepared a stump up a sizeable cash bet as to the speed with which that assumption would be proven wrong if assisted suicide were legalised.
At present, assisting a suicide is a crime which is frequently not prosecuted; this allows the exercise of judgement, and judgement (as opposed to calculation) is not wholly rational. To frame a law, we must put in place rules of calculation and in so doing remove the place of judgement - as that is what laws do.

But, hey, what do I know? What do you think?

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