Absolutely delighted to see
this on BBC News (though the headline is somewhat misleading).
Personally, I believe that choosing how and whether to die is as much a human right as having the autonomy to choose how to live; and since suicide is (thank goodness) no longer a crime in the UK, it has never made sense to me that assisting a suicide
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My feeling is that the morality of it is a very, very personal and case-by-case thing, and it's not a situation (very like, as you say, abortion) where I would ever presume to impose my personal views on someone else, or where I think it is the state's role to say "you may/you may not". Hence I don't think either suicide or assisting it should be illegal.
Encouraging suicide is a very different matter. Lots of the organisations in the UK who oppose ending the legal ban on assisting suicide argue that removing the legal bar would cause pressure to be put on vulnerable people by unsympathetic family members to end their lives when they are perceived as a burden. Now: that might happen, it might not. But in that case, it should be that (encouraging suicide) that's illegal; not simply aiding someone who is physically (but not at all mentally) incapacitated from carrying out their own wishes. Now it might be difficult in practice ( ... )
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