A Good Report On The UK Status Of Assisted Suicide

Here’s a good piece from the UK that lays out the current state of the pro-death influence.

Debating death The fight for clearer rules conceals a drive for legalisation

THE argument over the ethics of assisting the terminally ill to die is sharpening, as two recent cases concentrate minds. On June 25th Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, said that Michael Irwin and Alan Cutkelvin Rees would not be prosecuted for helping Raymond Cutkelvin, who had pancreatic cancer, die at a Swiss clinic in 2007. Prosecuting would not be in the public interest, he held: Mr Rees was motivated by compassion; Mr Irwin, a former doctor, was an elderly man; and neither had profited from the death.

In another, very different, case, the General Medical Council struck Howard Martin off the medical register on June 18th. Mr Martin admitted to hastening the death of a number of patients and said that he had not always sought consent from sufferers or their families before doing so. In 2005 he was acquitted of murdering three patients through overdoses of morphine. The police may reopen that investigation. more