Alexander Chancellor

Assisted suicide is too close to murder to be legal

Yet archbishops are lining up to support Lord Falconer's bill

[Getty Images/iStock] 
issue 19 July 2014

How amazing to have two former Anglican archbishops, George Carey of Canterbury and Desmond Tutu of South Africa, supporting Lord Falconer’s bill to legalise assisted suicide! It has always been, and remains, a firm doctrine of the Church of England that it is wrong to take a life. Yet here are two Church leaders agreeing with a majority of Britons — more than 80 per cent, according to the polls — that it should be legal for a doctor to supply a suffering, terminally ill patient with a lethal dose of poison if he wants it.

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