Posted on 12/21/2008 9:40:23 AM PST by wagglebee
t is a criminal offence to 'aid, abet, counsel or procure' someone else's suicide. But last week the Director of Public Prosecutions said there would be no charges against the parents of Daniel James, who accompanied their son earlier this year to a clinic in Switzerland where, with assistance, he ended his life.
~snip~
To those who believe the ability to take one's own life is an inalienable right, such circumstantial differences hardly matter. The fact that assistance was required is purely technical. But the technical fact of assistance inevitably raises a unique set of ethical and legal quandaries.
Even if it is accepted that, in certain circumstances, mercy demands that a life of terrible suffering end, it is extraordinarily hard to envisage a law that effectively gives one person licence to kill another. How, for example, could such a law establish whether a person dying was of fully sound mind, or that their medical prognosis was so accurate that they could truly deduce there was no hope of recovery? How might the law reasonably investigate the motives of the person assisting the suicide, or of the doctor facilitating it?...
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
I cannot think of a more "universal principle" than "Thou shalt not kill."
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"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
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