Suicide and Euthanasia. The long but compelling road to Logan's Run.

I doubt if I can add any great wisdom to this debate, but am blogging it anyway because it was the very first issue we did at school, in a religion class in 1974, when we looked at the future of euthanasia. It was the start of my futurology life.

Suicide is inextricably linked to the euthanasia debate, mainly because it is impossible to know for certain what is in someone's mind, and that is the basis of the well known slippery slope. The stages are reasonably clear, even without any invocation of religious morality. Was it a genuine suicide, originating from that person's free thoughts, based solely on their own interests? Or was it a personal decision influenced by the interests of others, real or imagined? Or was it a personal decision made after pressure from friends and relatives who want the person to die peacefully rather than suffer, with the best possible interests of the person in mind? In which case, who first raised the possibility of suicide as a potential way out? Or a personal decision made after pressure applied because relatives want rid of the person, perhaps over-eager to inherit or wanting to end their efforts to care for them? Guilt can be a powerful force and can be applied very subtly indeed over a period of time. Or if the person is losing their ability to communicate a little, perhaps a friend or relative may help interpret their wishes to a doctor. From here, it is a matter of degree of communication skill loss and gradual increase of the part relatives play in guiding the doctor's opinion of whether the person genuinely wants to die. Eventually, the person might not be directly consulted because their relatives can persuade a doctor that they really want to die but can't say so effectively? And not much further along the path until people make their minds up what is in the best interests of another person as far as living or dying goes. It is a smooth path between these many small steps from genuine suicide to euthanasia. And that all ignores all the impact of possible alternatives such as pain relief, welfare, special care etc.

Once the state starts to get involved in deciding cases, even by abdicating it to doctors, it is a long but easy road to Logan's run, where death is compulsory at a certain age, or a certain care cost, or you've used up your lifetime carbon credit allocation.

My concern is that the situation we are in now is at one extreme of this slope. There have been a few very clear cases where someone obviously able to make up their own mind has made a thoroughly thought-through decision to end their life because of ongoing pain, poor quality of life and no hope of any cure or recovery, the only prospect being worsening condition leading to an undignified death. Few people would argue with their decision to die, and I certainly think they should be permitted to do so, without any fear for their friends or relatives being prosecuted.

If it stops there, I would have no objections. But it won't. There are rarely razor-sharp lines between cases; situations always get blurred sometimes because of the complexity of individual lives, and because judges have their own personalities and differ slightly in their judgements. There is inevitably another case slightly further down the line that seems reasonable to a particular judge in the circumstances, and once that point is passed, and accepted by the courts, other cases with slightly less-defined circumstances will use it to help argue their's. This is the path by which most laws evolve. They start in parliament and then after implementation, case law and a gradually changing public mind-set gradually evolves them into something quite different.

So I think this is now the beginning of the end. The predictions we made in our religion class in 1974 will now come to pass as we thought. We will accept suicide, then facilitate it, then it will evolve into euthanasia by a million small but apparently reasonable steps, and one day we will have Logan's Run.