The Sunday Times reports today that new guidance will be issued this week decriminalising the assisting of suicides, with an attempt being made to distinguish between assisting and encouraging suicide.
I shan't repeat most of my arguments against this, which you can find here, here and here. But I will re-iterate the following:
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This will have little, if any, practical impact upon those that assist final-stage terminally ill relatives to commit suicide, none of whom has ever been convicted of assisting a suicide under the current law.
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The most important impact of decriminalising the assisting of suicide is that it will make unsustainable our current structure of medical and civic intervention to prevent people from committing suicide. If there is a human right to kill yourself, then those doctors that drug or restrain suicidal people, and those friends that hold them back, are human rights violators and such human rights violation will not indefinitely be regarded benignly by the Law. The end result will be thousands upon thousands of needless deaths.
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It will not, indefinitely, be sustainable to prevent the sale of suicide kits. Indeed, foundations will probably establish suicide assistance clinics in the UK. And of course if it is legal to sell suicide kits to people, it must also be legal to sell them razor blades, large doses of pain killers, and so on.
- Of less material significance than the above large numbers of cases in which genuine suicides will be assisted, but also worth mentioning, is that it will not be feasible, in practice, to distinguish unambiguously, in every case, between assisting and encouraging suicide. The result will be a small number of cases of non-genuine "assisted suicide". I believe that it is a mistake for opponents of this law to focus on this small number of deaths and ignore the much larger numbers of deaths arising from the other factors, but it should certainly be mentioned in a whole picture.
I hope you're pleased with the society you've wished for, when you see it.
