Voluntary euthanasia
Sir: Beverley Nichols (February 8) puts the case for voluntary euthanasia clearly and cogently. It is nothing short of scandalous that 18 per cent of suicides today are associated with severe organic disease. One reads almost daily of persons who have 'taken things into their own hands' in such circumstances. This is the very time they need the help and comfort of society. instead they have to "take a hundred aspirins in a corner" in utter loneliness and despair. It is a cruel and remorseless society that refuses to accept the legitimacy of planned dying as a reasonable alternative to continued unwanted existence.
If voluntary dying were available on request many who today commit a lonely suicide under temporary depression could be saved. Others, whose plea any sensible person would support, would be granted a terminal anaesthetic. The word 'suicide', like the word 'leper' should disappear as the rightness of voluntary dying in well-defined circumstances were accepted. The definition of these circumstances and the process itself should be accepted as part of total medical care. The parameters of medicine have been enlarged before (as, for example, when public health became the responsibility of doctors).
It is time this matter were taken firmly out of the domain of general social prohibition into that of private personal decision. This has happened in the case of contraception and abortion, both originally condemned by society, practised illicitly at first and now practised legally and respectably at the discretion of the individual. The process whereby private suicide becomes public dying by arrangement should follow the same pattern once the taboos of an out-dated quasi-religious objection have been removed.
S. L. Henderson-Smith Portland House, Lindley, Huddersfield
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