A decision to assist a son in his wish to die is without doubt one of the most difficult that any family could face. The Irish family at the centre of the assisted suicide case reported by this newspaper yesterday have declined to speak publicly about their experience involving a 37-year-old quadriplegic. But it is surely safe to assume that it involved an agonising reconciliation of their sense of the sanctity of life with a natural desire to respect personal autonomy and wishes. They should not be judged quickly.
Nor should the choices involved be viewed as so exceptional. A hundred years ago, when average life expectancy was 47, people who got sick either recovered or died quickly. Today it is 77. Very many of us, courtesy of modern medicine's ability to keep bodily functions ticking over, face the prospect of a significant period of disability, perhaps in pain or unconsciousness. And it is inevitable that confronted with such a fate, some would want to make a personal decision about the point at which they would wish medical intervention to cease or to be assisted to achieve what they see as a dignified death.
As a society we should not avoid that difficult discussion involved, or simply leave it to the discretion of doctors, not a few of whom - by omission or commission - may have, in the absence of safeguards or ground rules, gently hastened the inevitable out of kindness. Nor will the slogan "all life is sacred" suffice as a complete response, any more than it did in the abortion debate.
To date in Europe only Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands have put assisted suicide on a legal footing. Others are engaged in a debate. A House of Lords committee will report on the issue in Britain on Monday. International evidence has shown that both within the medical profession and the public at large there is an openness to putting doctor-assisted death into a legal framework. A survey in 2004 of 1,000 UK doctors (conducted for the Voluntary Euthanasia Society by independent pollsters Medix) found that 51 per cent favoured legislation to allow doctor-assisted suicide within stringent national safeguards, while 27 per cent wanted the criminal law to forbid the practice.
Asked "under what circumstances do you think physician-assisted suicide (ie where a person wishing to take their own life with the indirect help of a doctor, eg by providing a prescription for drugs) should be permitted by law?" 45 per cent said "when a patient is terminally ill with unbearable suffering". Forty two per cent said "under no circumstances". A quarter of the doctors said they had been asked by a patient to assist in their suicide.
An NOP poll found that in the British general public, 82 per cent (and 81 per cent of Catholics) believed "a person who is suffering unbearably from a terminal illness should be allowed by law to receive medical help to die". It would be interesting to see if the results of a comparable Irish survey would differ that much.