Suicide should never have been illegal in the first place. It belongs with all the other laws enacted in the past to limit peoples' legitimate life-choices. Choices about what religion to follow, what to wear, what to eat and all the rest.
If we admit the right of the individual to live in a way they see fit, as long as it does no harm to others, then we must, in justice, admit a persons' right to end their life at a time and in a manner of their own choosing. Again, as long as no-one else is harmed (and I mean actually harmed, not just upset).
If the only future is a a painful and humiliating death, in a hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and monitors and so drugged that one cannot recognise and respond to ones' loved ones. If the last image of a person their loved ones have is that horror. What then the value of the life? All joyful memories gone, forever wiped out by the image of that gaunt, waxen-skinned, mechanically-supported living corpse. Faced with that, what sane, humane person would not rather leave this life with calm, dignity and the chance to say a proper farewell? Rather leave the memory of a last talk, a final smile and embrace before quietly falling asleep forever.
If life, due to mental or physical illness, is a torment no treatment can alleviate. If the only, faint and perhaps delusive, hope is a medical miracle that may or may not occur during ones' lifetime. If medicine, philosophy, religion, psychiatry and the love and support of others have proved insufficient or unavailing, should not the final alternative be available?
People fear death. In part because it is unknown, the "undiscovered country". But they also fear, and far more, life without hope, life full of pain, life that has beome prolonged torture. We do not subject our beloved dogs and cats to such suffering. When there is no hope of recovery, when the frailty of age takes the joy from their lives, we help them go to sleep. But poor old Grandma? She must go through torments the Inquisition would sicken at! For what? For a few days, weeks or months more of joyless, hideous, agonising 'life'? To obey the adamantine decrees of an imaginary Creator?
There must be another way avaialble to those who wish it. We are no longer a God-ridden society, glorying in pain as a deserved divine punishment for our imagined (or even real) misdeeds. Death is a natural process, but we are not natural creatures. We have done so much to remove the pain, suffering and fear from life. Let's do the same about death.
