A welcome rejection of assisted suicide

I’m delighted that Lord Falconer has just failed in his attempt to legalise assisted suicide for people sending friends and relatives to Swiss death clinics. This is a topic which I suspect even CoffeeHousers will be evenly divided on, but to me the whole idea is just wrong – and it goes straight to the heart of how we, as a society, regard the disabled and the elderly. For those who haven’t been following the debate, Falconer used the Coroners and Justice Bill to propose a new law to make it legal to help one’s friends and relatives be killed in the Swiss death clinics. He proposed that any two doctors can be “of the opinion in good faith” that someone is terminally ill, yet mentally coherent enough to make the decision to go to Switzerland for the lethal injection. The debate in the Lords was excellent, and flagged up the many problems with this.