From the editor’s desk

Euthanasia by stealth

More than 100 British people, assisted in many cases by friends and relatives, have gone to Switzerland to end their own lives. Although assisting in another's suicide is illegal, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has decided on compassionate grounds that criminal proceedings against the relatives would not be in the public interest. This reflects the wisdom that good law needs a stern face but a kind heart - justice and mercy together. An amendment designed to bring the law into line with existing practice is being proposed by Lord Falconer, a former Labour Lord Chancellor. Three religious leaders, the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster and the Chief Rabbi, have written jointly to The Daily Telegraph denouncing these proposals, saying that such tinkering with the law is dangerous. It is important that their warning is heeded.

Lord Falconer tries to present his amendment as a tidying up of the law, but the implications go far wider. The current law is an essential component in a complex legal framework based on the principle - whether secularists like the language or not - that life is sacred. Pull out one brick, and the rest are destabilised. It is characteristic of those making the claim to total personal autonomy over life and death decisions, as much in this debate as in the more general argument over assisted suicide, that they ignore the damage that would be done to the rest of the community if their demands were met. All such acts and decisions have a social dimension, whose presence is represented as the law now stands by the role of the CPS and the Director of Public Prosecutions. To dispense from a law in given circumstances, largely on the grounds of compassion, is entirely different from repealing such a law altogether in the name of autonomy, because that is to say the social dimension does not exist. To reverse John Donne, "man" would then indeed be "an island entire of itself".

Lord Falconer argues that his amendment enables would-be suicides to postpone their fateful journey to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to a point nearer the time of death. But this would open the way to organised trips by ambulance, even on a commercial basis. That is not just "tidying up". It is changing behaviour, making suicide easier. Lord Falconer bases his case on personal autonomy. But this is inconsistent with his proposed safeguard that those being assisted to travel abroad to die should have to show they are in the later stages of a terminal disease. Why wait to grant them autonomy until they are terminally ill? Indeed, evidence has already come to light that many of those going to Switzerland take this view already. Some have diseases that are not fatal; some want to die for the same sorts of reason people jump off Beachy Head. Indeed, why should Lord Falconer want to stop them?

It seems that what Lord Falconer and his supporters are trying to do is to whittle down opposition to legislation permitting assisted suicide in general, which the House of Lords has rejected a number of times. Having failed in a frontal assault, they are adopting the tactics of little by little. But this is not a small change to tidy up the law. It is part of a campaign whose ultimate objective is to legalise euthanasia.