
Assisted suicide, mercy killing, euthanasia – call it what you will – simply won’t go away, and it promises to run and run for years to come.
In the recent past, we have been treated to the outpourings of Martin Amis and
Terry Pratchett on euthanasia and assisted suicide, and both merit our careful consideration.
Martin Amis, I suspect with tongue-in-cheek, advocates
“euthanasia booths” on street corners where the elderly can end their lives with a martini and a medal. He predicts a “silver tsunami” of increasingly elderly and thoroughly useless people, stinking out the restaurants and cafés and shops, in constant conflict with the younger generation. He has a point, although not attractively made. More and more of our precious resources will have to be devoted to them, from the doctor’s surgery, to the hospitals, to the care homes and finally to the hospices. And as we all know, the state pension was devised to support the elderly into their mid-seventies, not into their eighties and nineties.