Life After Death

designed to bring about death. That was why it was done. It was decided that it was time he died."

For the first time, the courts crossed the line and legally sanctioned the intentional killing of a patient: euthanasia.

Lethal Arguments The extension of the euthanasia argument, logical enough if you accept the basic premise, came in 1997 in an article in The Lancet. A leading physician, Sir Raymond Hoffenberg, suggested that patients in a persistive vegetative state should be given lethal injections and their organs taken for transplant. So now we have it: if you become insensible we can avoid the costs and inconvenience of care and hospices. Rather than waste your mortal remains by starving you to death, you will be used instead as a rich source of organs. The flaws in this silver-tongued argument revolve around questions of consent, the commissioning of doctors and nurses as killers, and the fundamental question of life itself. But how many people will be confident enough to stand up to the battery of commentators, lawyers, propagandists, and hard cases which will be used to undermine previous widespread opposition to the killing of patients? There is a clear line between killing and letting die - and the present law recognises that. 'Care' and 'kill' cannot be used as synonyms. But are we confident enough in ourselves to defend this line - or will we abandon these defences and once again retreat? In 1997, Lord Lester, no longer an impartial adviser, went to the High Court. He tried to obtain permission for the doctor of Annie Lindsell - who suffered from motor neuron disease, to administer drugs which would relieve her mental and physical distress during the final stages of the disease. The case was financed by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and collapsed because it was agreed that under the principle of 'double effect' no court ruling was needed. If a doctor's motive is control of pain, it is always acceptable. If it is to accelerate death deliberately, it is criminal.

Dangerous Philosophers Yet, inevitably, luminaries such as Baroness Warnock were on hand to tell us that the law should be 'clarified' and that this was not a "slippery slope". Why should we accept that the law needs to be clarified - when we know that clarification will be a cover for all manner of excesses? David Oliver, Medical Director of Wisdom Hospice, says: "I am mystified why Ms Lindsell and Dr Holmes felt it necessary to go to court over a treatment that is readily available to her in the first place, and which doctors carry out daily without fear of prosecution". Dr Robert Twycross, Macmillan Clinical Reader in Palliative Medicine at the University of Oxford, says: "No-one need die in agony. It is not necessary to legalise mercykilling/euthanasia to make this claim a reality."

A Home Office Minister