Suicide is legal – why are those who need assistance denied this right?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/26/suicide-legal-assistance-kill-themselves

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Both my maternal grandparents attempted suicide. Both failed, though their attempts were serious. My grandfather, deeply depressed by a marriage he should never have agreed to, tried to kill himself three weeks after the wedding. That was in the 1930s, when suicide was still illegal in England – it was only legalised in 1961. He survived, was given electroconvulsive therapy and spent most of the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital and protected accommodation. In the late 1980s, my grandmother took an overdose of sleeping pills because she had become convinced she was showing the first signs of dementia. She wanted to get out while she could. Her wish was granted a few months later, partly as a result of the damage she had inflicted on herself.

Both had judged their lives no longer worth living; both had taken action. I respect their decisions. I'm not in a position to say that either was wrong about what lay ahead for them, though they may have underestimated the effects on those close to them.

In the 50 years between the two attempts the law and social attitudes towards suicide had changed significantly. My grandfather could have been prosecuted; my grandmother, by contrast, was exercising a legal right to try to end a life that she believed was about to become unbearable.

During the first world war, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his notebook: "If suicide is allowed anything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin."

Immanuel Kant would have agreed. He thought we were each God's property and so had no right to end our lives. Killing yourself was, he claimed, a way of making yourself less than human, beast-like. You couldn't possibly universalise the desire to kill yourself. By ending your life you ended your possibility of acting morally, an act that couldn't itself be moral.

Few would agree today, though. Many of us hold that suicide can be the right, or at least a morally acceptable, response to a life no longer deemed worth living by the person living it – one of intense physical or psychological pain, for example. Those who cling to a religious prohibition on suicide on the grounds that only God should have the power to end our lives are faced with the difficulty that David Hume pointed out long ago in his essay "Of suicide" – if it's wrong to end a life because that is a way of playing God, then by the same reasoning it should also be wrong to take precautions to extend it in any way. Few are prepared to bite that bullet.

The legality of suicide in England is no longer controversial. It now seems absurd that anyone was ever prosecuted for attempting to kill themselves. We have a legal right to take our own lives. Those who are physically incapable of carrying out their own suicide, though, are in a different position. They have to rely on others' help and yet, under current legislation, that may result in prosecution for those who assist them. They are effectively denied the choice about their continuing existence that the rest of us enjoy. It is interesting that campaigners have mostly focused on the case for assisted dying, rather than assisted euthanasia, perhaps because the former is easier to monitor, that is, when an individual is terminally ill, is suffering intensely and seeks to hasten the end to that suffering.

Yet, a stronger liberal position would maintain the need for equality of access to the means of exit for all, provided there were adequate checks on the possible abuse of the law. If those who can do it themselves have a moral and legal right to commit suicide even if they aren't terminally ill, why withhold that right from those who cannot administer the means of suicide by their own hands? The only plausible response is an appeal regarding the likely side effects and exploitation of the system, but that is something that could be tested with controlled pilot studies, and safeguards could be put in place. This sort of reasoning sidesteps those who argue that the existence of good palliative care removes this necessity. It is not simply a question of whether people are condemned to suffer, but one of equal rights and choices over whether to carry on.

If the unassisted can determine not just whether they kill themselves, but when and on what grounds, then shouldn't we try and extend that right to those who can no longer administer the means to die? It is deeply patronising to argue that suicide should only be open to you if you are terminally ill and in decline when others can freely choose to die despite having many years ahead of them.

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