Doom Gloom and Ending it all = 1st January 2012

The beginning of year media commentaries have been particularly doom laden, what with the Euro still in intensive care and the world economy on a knife edge with every prospect of spiralling into another downturn. Whilst there are always doom merchants predicting disaster at the beginning of every year, after all, every generation has thought it would be the last, 2012 is a particular candidate for the end of the world as we know it. The ancient South American civilisation of the Mayas had a calendar stretching into the future, and it comes to an abrupt end in 2012. They believed that the Gods gave each human creation only 5000 years before despairing at the mess, scrapping it, and starting all over again: on 21 Dec 2012 our time is up.

Last week saw the publication of the Coffee Table Book of Doom, here is a taste of its promotional blurb

...with the apocalypse at hand, don’t fret about dying uniformed. The Coffee Table Book of Doom is a revelatory, brilliantly funny, superbly illustrated and erudite compendium of all the 27 doom-laden horsemen we need to worry about – personal doom, gender erosion, asteroid impact, pandemics, super storms, sexual ruin – and much more besides.

For those of us miserable at the prospect of the financial crisis and economic gloom the prospect of being vaporised in a nanosecond by an asteroid –and without ever knowing anything about it – may seem preferable. The Book of Doom however, is wrong about that possibility at least: I received a copy of the December edition of the magazine Sky at Night in my Christmas stocking and I read that NASA’s latest study has downgraded the asteroid threat to our planet; apparently there are only half as many threatening asteroids than was previously thought. Collective oblivion is therefore unlikely.

There are those genuinely suffering from depression , so horrified at the prospect of debilitating illness, or some other calamity that they are driven to take their own lives. Society has not been kind to them. The Church refused them Christian burial and warned anyone contemplating suicide that eternal damnation was their only destiny should they succeed. Even to attempt suicide was until relatively recently a criminal offence. We are now rightly much more charitable in our attitude to the dreadful pressures placed on some individuals. As Graham Greene observed in the Heart of the Matter “the Church knows all the rules, but it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart”. Some people are visited with enormous suffering without being granted the strength to bear it. It is not our place to be their judge, but to live in the hope that in eternal life they will be granted the strength and relief denied them in this world. The law has been changed: it is no longer a criminal offence to attempt suicide, but should we go further?

This week Lord Falconer’s commission will report the findings of its review of the law on assisting suicide. It remains a criminal offence to assist anyone to commit suicide, ought we to change that?

This is a profoundly difficult issue and I get a dozen or so letters per year demanding such a change. I am not unsympathetic and I can entirely understand the motive. Imagine the dilemma facing someone fearful of a painful conclusion to a debilitating terminal illness and their determination to avoid it by dying at a time, and in a condition of their own choosing: should they cut their time short by attempting suicide now, whilst they are physically capable and in control of all their faculties?

Or should they hold on longer, running the risk that their friend or companion face prosecution for assisting them later, if they lose the ability to do the deed themselves?

I am not persuaded. It strikes me that there is great danger in such a change to the law. If it becomes lawful to assist someone to commit suicide, how long will it be before it becomes ‘expected’. I fear a time when elderly, ill and vulnerable people will feel ever so subtle pressures to ‘do the decent thing’ rather than go on ‘being a burden’ and using up the family’s potential inheritance. I am afraid I take too dim a view of human nature to contemplate legislation to change the current position.

There has always been ‘mercy killing’ in desperate and extreme circumstances, but to try and codify these permissible circumstances is to court great danger. Those who feel that they have to assist a loved one in such a dying wish are placed in a dreadful situation, but I see no way out. If they do face prosecution there is always the safeguard of the reasonable judgement of the 12 fellow feeling human beings that constitute a jury. It is hard, but I do not think there is another way.