There is a play in which an elderly man and his son are facing up to a visit to their local clinic. (Declaration of interest: I wrote this play, The Clinic.) It is set about 30 years in the future, when medicine has advanced to the point that the doctor can tell the elderly man not only that he has an incurable condition, but that he has exactly three years, three months, and three days to live. After seeing the doctor, the man goes to see a counsellor, who discusses with him at what point he will take the pill that will kill him. She stresses it is very much his decision, but the unstated assumption is that at some point he will ask for this. However, the man and his son decide to buck the system. A few years earlier, the man’s wife had asked for a lethal dose that had shortened her life, a decision they had regretted ever since. The elderly man decides to see out the illness to the end, not hasten the death.
Proponents of assisted dying will complain that this is too far-fetched; that we would never become a society in which assisted dying was the default position. But they are wrong for the very reason that drives them to support the present bill: compassion. It is compassion that quite rightly wants to stop the suffering of those for whom it has become unbearable. But why should it be limited to those with just a few months to live? A man with Parkinson’s has already complained that the proposed bill does not go far enough for him. A few years ago, a young man paralysed from the chest down as a result of a rugby accident went to Switzerland with Dignitas to end his life. Who could not feel for him? Rugby had been his passion. What had he to live for now? His prospect, of a lifetime in that condition, would seem to some to be even more appalling than someone having to live with cancer for six months. If the proposed bill was passed, there would immediately be pressure to expand it in the direction of the laws in place in Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands. As Hannah Barnes has written in these pages, in the Netherlands there were 138 assisted deaths last year of people with a mental illness, the majority of them single women under 60 suffering from depression. One was under 20.
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