Right to die needs further debate

The Supreme Court of Appeal has upheld the government’s appeal against an earlier high court judgment granting euthanasia advocate and cancer sufferer Robert Stransham-Ford the right to doctor-assisted suicide. Stransham-Ford died of natural causes just hours before the original decision had given what was seen as the green light to bring one’s own life to an end.

The appeal court clearly saw the issue as a much broader one, a decision almost certainly at odds with this country’s predominant ethical mores and felt that judges alone could not be expected to determine another human being’s right to die.

The most salient point, though, is that self-induced euthanasia – technically suicide – or having a willing, medically trained helper to do this is, by its very nature, a deeply personal issue of conscience.

Like abortion, there will patently be those who hold the right to life sacred and those who hold that controlling the destiny of one’s own being is the paramount consideration.

The two conflicting opinions can, because of their polarisation, never reach any form of compromise.

It is hard for the layman to take any stance other than that which circumstances have forced the individual into as a guideline on anything remotely as radical to many as euthanasia.

For them the very core of human life is the promotion of the hypothesis of the living.

Neither is it within the ambit of those who oppose assisted suicide to judge the advocates of the counter view.

It is a serious debate which the appeal court has, we feel rightly, handed back to the nation as a whole to deliberate on.

But it must be reasoned deliberation and sincere and roundly thought-out debate. The issue is too serious for any other course to be followed.