Assisted dying - a question of misplaced trust

This is supported by independent studies undertaken in areas where assisted dying and euthanasia have long been on the statute books, including the Netherlands.

According to a study undertaken by a Dutch University a few years ago, only five percent of patients who decided to go through with doctor-assisted suicide listed pain as the biggest factor in their decision. The most prominent factor was the fear of suffering – and 24 percent of the people surveyed said that fear of humiliation was their strongest motivation. (At the time of the study, more than a third of all euthanasia cases in that nation were AIDS related.)

Furthermore, an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2008 showed that 21 percent of people receiving assisted dying in Dignitas did not have a terminal or progressive illness, but rather felt a 'weariness of life'.

A very generic law would be absolutely useless in the case of assisted dying. Given the possibilities for abuse and even criminal acts, regulations would need to be iron-clad, leaving little room for interpretation. Yet the law would be dealing in the highly subjective areas of psycho-emotional pain, so it could not possibly hope to be as concise and definitive as proponents of the right-to-die claim.

In the end, we all fear the pain and the loss of control that either severe sickness or old age may bring; but how would those charged with administering and interpreting assisted dying laws decide when it is appropriate for an individual to act on those fears?

Would debilitation be adjudged to occur after six months, a year, two years? When exactly would it be legal for someone to set up a contract to die? And how would new laws define debilitation? What is totally debilitating for one person may be quite manageable for another, especially if they are given the kind of patient care for which many hospitals and hospices have become well known.

The push for assisted dying is undoubtedly most often accompanied by compassionate motives. Yet, good intentions do not necessarily make good public policy.

What we face here is not simply a change in law but a major realignment of our basic cultural values.

The notion of the sanctity of human life is a cultural more that has bestowed great strength on our civilisation. It is one of the core values that has allowed us, thus far at least, to avoid the kind of collapse from within that has marked many earlier societies.

Throughout history, whenever a tolerance for killing has crept into a great civilisation, human values have been undermined and social structures have been mortally weakened. Moreover, societies invariably chip away at their own foundations whenever they move in directions which ensure that the vulnerable become more so.

Supporters of assisted dying will argue that safeguards can be installed to protect the poor, the young and the debilitated. This is naïve; it places far too much faith in systems that are set up and run by fallible human beings.

For all the talk about protective measures, present euthanasia laws in Europe are wide open to abuse. No law is water tight; there are always loopholes and the less than scrupulous are able to twist regulations, especially when they're loaded, as these laws can only be, with subjective language.