The UK must reject assisted suicide

The debate about assisted suicide and euthanasia tends to be dominated by appeals to emotion rather than reason, so it is always a relief to hear from more measured voices. Last week, the UK’s House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee (HSCC) published a new report on its inquiry into assisted suicide. It offers a comprehensive and unusually balanced discussion of the issue – much to the chagrin of assisted-suicide activists.

The HSCC inquiry heard arguments from both sides of the debate and looked at the data from places where assisted suicide is currently legal. Ultimately, the report neither endorses nor condemns the decriminalisation of assisted suicide.

Predictably, this has provoked the ire of some celebrity campaigners for assisted suicide. Former TV presenter Esther Rantzen said that she is ‘disappointed’ by the report and that parliament ‘urgently’ needs a free vote on the issue. Meanwhile, broadcaster Johnathan Dimbleby has criticised the report for failing to recommend decriminalisation. He claims that the UK’s current laws are ‘as anachronistically cruel as capital punishment’.

Plenty of news outlets are also clearly sympathetic to legalising assisted suicide and so they have either lambasted the report or misrepresented its conclusions. The supposedly impartial BBC, for instance, tells us: ‘The Health and Social Care Committee found evidence [assisted suicide] has led to better end-of-life care in countries where it is allowed.’ But it found nothing of the sort.

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