Assisted suicide
Sir – Fr Patrick Pullicino notes that “once started spreads quickly and it cannot be contained” (26 October). He says that one reason for this is that “assisted suicide quickly becomes an obligation”. This is surely correct. But there is another reason for the euthanasia “creep” that we have seen in countries such as Canada and Belgium. Euthanasia laws always begin with strict limits: only terminally ill people with a few months to live are allowed to be killed. Parliaments always justify passing such laws on the grounds that they will curtail intolerable suffering, and once one has accepted this justification of euthanasia as a good one, then any restriction of it to the terminally ill immediately begins to look both arbitrary and cruel. For example, if it is humane to prevent six months of suffering by killing, then why not seven months, or 20, or a decade? Once parliaments have accepted the justification for euthanasia in the first place, then the logic of such arguments is unanswerable, and so the time limits are widened and widened.
