Assisted dying - a question of misplaced trust

Ms Carr, who has been in a wheelchair since childhood, plays a forensic scientist in the BBC's popular drama Silent Witness.

'I know how fallible doctors are,' she says. 'It is very common for someone with a disability to be told they are not likely to live until a certain age – and for them to carry on living.

'I don't think doctors are malicious, but there is a prejudice. They wonder how someone they are treating can have any quality of life because they are so dependent on carers or seem to have lost their dignity.'

Liz Carr also worries about a gradual blurring of boundaries in the public mind between terminal illness and disability.

To be sure, the proposed laws open up unprecedented moral and legal minefields for the future.

First of all, there is the issue of how and where assisted death, were it to become institutionalised, would be administered.

Terry Pratchett, author of the acclaimed Discworld books, has made no secret of his desire to request an assisted death, at a time and in a manner of his choosing. In a BBC documentary broadcast in June 2011, Mr. Pratchett, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, said: 'Is it possible for someone like me, or you, to arrange the death they want? When I can no longer write my books, I'm not sure I will want to go on living.'

Mr. Pratchett has admitted that organisations like Dignitas, the Swiss clinic offering assisted death procedures, sound like 'one stop shops', providing a highly mechanised and impersonal approach to dying. Yet this is the inevitable eventual result of empowering professional practitioners to end a life upon request when care, if not cure, is available.

Already in some privatised aged care facilities, procedures for patient care have been trimmed to balance the books of private enterprise 'care providers'. The business side of the equation has overtaken the duty of care. Advocates of a right-to-die should take note: surrendering care of the feeble to the free market is not always a recipe for efficiency or, more importantly, compassion.

Even if initial laws stated that only government-run institutions could offer assisted death, the profit-seeking sector would assuredly look for ways to engage with the growth edge of this new social phenomenon. Inevitably, in a society driven in large part by market forces, we would see the emergence of a profit-making industry devoted to ending life, where the business of dying is more important than the duty of care.

Servicing at first the well-heeled classes, privately-owned, elegantly presented clinics would make a healthy income from trading on the promise of a comfortable death. More down-market centres would soon follow.

Advocates of assisted dying almost invariably express motivations based on the fear of a worsening physical or mental condition. Let's be in no doubt about this: it is very often the fear of suffering, not actual suffering itself, that is at the core of the debate about assisted dying.