Surely the time is right for a compassionate rethink?

Patricia Hewitt MP, has called for a change in British law allowing terminally ill, fully compos mentis adults to be allowed, free of legal penalty, to end their lives in Swiss clinics. I personally would go further and allow British clinics to offer a similar service but such is the opposition to assisted suicide that such a proposal is light years away.

So let's walk before we run. Ms Hewitt's compassionate appeal is very likely to fail to gain sufficient support because of the deeply rooted aversion to suicide within our culture. But why? Our Judeo-Christian culture has long taught an abhorrence of suicide as a grave sin against God so there are deep reasons why our legal attitudes reflect this. The Jewish and Roman Catholic faiths, particularly, view suicide as mortal sins.



But we are now in the 21st century and, without intending to offend anybody, I don't believe that modern government should necessarily reflect ingrained religious beliefs when so many people don't believe in God anyway. It seems to me there is a good case for a humanitarian rethink on this entire topic. Why is it necessary for a man or woman stricken with cancer, motor neurone disease or some life destroying disease to be propped up for maybe another decade with expensive drugs and treatments when that is simply not what they want? Who is made to feel better by this legal obligation? Whose consciences are satisfied? Probably not the patient who has reached a point where every day is a humiliating, embittered journey of survival possibly unable to move or even eat without help.

It is, of course, clear that suicide is so much the ultimate irreversible decision that safeguards have to be put in place to ensure that people whose minds are temporarily disturbed by broken love affairs etc are not allowed to flit to a clinic to end it all, but safeguards and a consultative process involving counselling physical and mental health over a period of months should enable a recommendation to be made with a reasonable certainty that the potential suicide has thought over all their options and has made a rational, clear choice that life is no longer worth living. That seems to me to be a kind and responsible social approach, not one which should incur legal penalty.

Ms Hewitt has my support and, even though her initiative seems doomed to fail this time, maybe it will start a thought process which will result in a more enlightened view before too long. I can but hope.