RECENT cases of assisted suicide have highlighted extremely harrowing suffering.

Consider, however, that age-old principle “hard cases don’t make good law”, appropriate now given renewed clamour to liberalise the assisted suicide law, extending boundaries safeguarding the integrity and value of all human life. Hitherto to be human signified “specialness” and “inviolability”.

But dare we wish away this inviolability, blind to the potential and inevitable consequences? Do we want endless boundary extensions followed by extensions to the boundary extensions, etc, until we have anarchy?

Precedents abound. Did David Steele (1967), whose abortion law envisaged 6,000 annual “hard cases”, anticipate 200,000 today?

And how many abortions result from that family/partner pressure that will assuredly influence some old, sick, incapacitated people towards suicide, given the incidence of media reports of abuse and illtreatment from that source?

Who will guarantee that abuse/erosion of law won’t occur – ever? Why did we condemn Nazi inhumanity for “euthanising” recent camp arrivals too old, sick, incapacitated for work, and subsequently execute them for war crimes?

Law-makers must either uphold the inviolability of human life until natural death or spin the suicide roulette wheel – like the abortion laws – with unpredictable consequences.

Michael Baldasera, Darlington.