The Prime Minister has condemned recent calls for assisted suicide to be legalised in an article published in the Daily Telegraph today. In an article entitled ‘We must resist the call to legalise assisted suicide’ he highlighted the dangers of changing the current law:

“The law – together with the values and standards of our caring professions – supports good care, including palliative care for the most difficult of conditions; and also protects the most vulnerable in our society. For let us be clear: death as an option and an entitlement, via whatever bureaucratic processes a change in the law might devise, would fundamentally change the way we think about mortality.

The risk of pressures – however subtle – on the frail and the vulnerable, who may feel their existences burdensome to others, cannot ever be entirely excluded. And the inevitable erosion of trust in the caring professions – if they were in a position to end life – would be to lose something very precious.”

These comments come on the eve of the publication of the Director of Public Prosecution’s guidelines on assisted suicide. Commenting on the Prime Minister’s statement, Simon Hopkins from the ProLife Alliance said:

“We welcome this timely intervention in the assisted suicide debate by Gordon Brown and fully support his well-thought-out views on the subject. There is a clear cross-party consensus that assisted suicide should not be legalised which has been borne out time and again in votes in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. However there is now a danger that Parliament’s prerogative to determine the law will be circumvented by imminent guidelines and would advise the DPP to take note of the overwhelming level of informed opinion against assisted suicide as he finalises his policy.”