TUV Leader cautions against diminishing the sanctity of human life
23 September 2009
Commenting on the DPP’s guidelines regarding when prosecutions might proceed for assisting suicide TUV Leader Jim Allister QC said:
“Whereas in the law there must always be room for compassion, it is also important that an environment is not created which diminishes the sanctity of human life. Assisting suicide is and must remain a serious criminal offence. It is all very well to talk grandly about requiring an ‘informed’ decision, but if the societal climate is created whereby the aged and infirm feel a burden on loved ones, then affirmations of desire to end their own lives may be more informed by those pressures than by genuine desire.
“Thus I fear the very issuing of these guidelines, setting parameters when assisting suicide will be acceptable, will engender the wrong pressures and increase the suicide rate. In Northern Ireland we already have a frightening suicide rate; sanitising the very act by prescribing circumstances where its assistance will be tolerated within the law, is something likely to increase not diminish incidents of suicide. People who commit suicide are invariably in a fragile state; creating an atmosphere where the law can acquiesce in assisting the act will, inevitably, make the act itself seem less reprehensible.
“Human life is sacred; proposals which contemplate turning a blind eye to helping to end life will damage the ethos of the sanctity of life and thereby engender an ethos which cheapens life.”
