No matter how well doctors look after terminally ill patients there will always be cases like that of Diane Pretty who fears

No matter how well doctors look after terminally ill patients, there will always be cases like that of Diane Pretty, who fears her husband will be prosecuted if he assists her to commit suicide. In principle, I am sympathetic to people who want to legalise voluntary euthanasia. No matter how well doctors look after terminally ill patients, there will always be cases like that of Diane Pretty, who fears her husband will be prosecuted if he assists her to commit suicide.
Mrs Pretty suffers from motor neurone disease and her desire to end her life when she chooses, and with dignity, is understandable; there is clearly a need for a legal mechanism that would allow people in her situation to request help in dying if they are too physically impaired to do it themselves. Having said that, I cannot help feeling queasy about the voluntary euthanasia industry – organisations and individuals dedicated to helping other people, often complete strangers, shuffle off this mortal coil.Some of them have macabre names like Exit and the Hemlock Society, and there is a rash of websites where you can find instructions on how to commit suicide.

One offers a neat little “right to die” badge that can be ordered online. Another provides a list of “do-it-yourself” books on hastening death. “They are intended to guide terminally ill individuals whose quality of life has shrunk to nothing,” the site declares. “They are not intended to help depressed people commit suicide.” But there is no way of making sure that unhappy teenagers or depressed adults take notice of this pious warning.The best-known of these books is Final Exit by Derek Humphry, a former Sunday Times journalist who now lives in Oregon, where assisted suicide is legal under certain conditions. It discusses the practicalities of “self-deliverance and assisted suicide for the dying” and is “one of the most popular books ordered by visitors to this website”. Humphry has also made an appearance, in a less benevolent light, on a rival website. “Protect your loved ones from February’s anti-Christ of the month, Derek Humphry,” the hysterical home page declared.

It went on to berate him as a “scumbag” – oh, the joys of reasoned debate – and it will not come as a surprise to learn that the people who employ this kind of language are Christian fundamentalists from the United States, fanatical opponents of abortion as well as assisted suicide.At the same time, it is hard not to conclude that some euthanasia enthusiasts play into their hands, revealing an obsessiveness on the subject that verges on necrophilia. The most famous is an American doctor called Jack Kevorkian, who acquired the nickname “Dr Death” from his habit of travelling round the country helping people to die. Kevorkian is currently serving a prison sentence in Michigan for murder, after administering a lethal injection to a 52-year-old man on national television and daring the authorities to stop his crusade. They did.Kevorkian is believed to have supervised more than a hundred suicides, yet an analysis of 69 of the cases by a team at the University of South Florida concluded that three-quarters were not terminally ill and five showed no evidence of any physical disease.