Alex Massie Alex Massie

Suicide is Painless, It Brings on Many Changes…

No-one could mistake back-bench Conservative MPs for advocates for limited government. So it’s scarcely surprising that Nadine Dorries and Edward Leigh are up in arms over proposals to “clarify” the law (in England and Wales) on assisted suicide. You might think it’s your body and your life but that doesn’t mean you have the right to decide your own fate. No way. Not if these energetic busybodies have anything to do with it.

On her blog, Dorries raises the preposterous prospect of state-sponsored death squads marauding through Britain’s nursing homes and hospitals, pulling out plugs and smothering pensioners with their pillows. She doesn’t put it quite as colourfully as that, but that’s the spectre she’s raising.

To put it mildly, this seems unlikely. Perhaps the 1971 Suicide Act does require updating but Dorries is surely mistaken and the consequences of enabling Assisted Suicide rather less severe than she imagines. Not least because we can compare the English situation with the law as it stands in Scotland.

It may be a criminal offence to assist someone to die in England but there’s no such offence in Scotland. Notionally such activity could result in a charge of culpable homicide, but Lallands Peat Worrier has persuaded me that actually there’s no law there. So, while it’s been illegal to help someone kill themselves in England, no such law has applied in Scotland, for the simple reason that there is no law and, consequently, no “clarity” of the sort that exists in England. 

And yet, despite that, there’s been no epidemic of or mania for assisted suicide. The country’s nursing homes remain well stocked. Even, you might say, overstocked*.

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