From a logical point of view, there is no escape: those who support the right to "assisted suicide" affirm that each of us is the sole master of our life. Let's admit that this is the case: but for this very reason, anyone who wants to suppress "his" life must do it alone; if another takes charge, life no longer belongs to him, but to that other. So if he wants to end it, he has to think about it himself. (...)
From a legal point of view there is an insurmountable barrier: article 575 of the Criminal Code, which punishes "whoever causes the death of a man" with imprisonment from 21 years to life. There are mitigating circumstances, but no exceptions: no one can take the life of another, period. If he does it voluntarily, he commits voluntary manslaughter. Even if the victim was consenting, or begged him to do it, or even paid him to do it. (...)
From an ethical point of view, another insurmountable wall: the "Hippocratic oath" that every doctor, dentist and even veterinarian must take before starting their profession. There is no need to add anything else. (...)
How can you ask a doctor to take the life of his patient, that is, to overturn his professional duty of always saving her by 180 degrees? It would be much less serious if those who want to commit suicide, but don't feel like doing it alone, hired a professional killer to get shot from a distance when they least expect it: at least the killer, by profession, kills people; the doctor, by profession, must save her. If he helps you kill yourself he's an executioner, not a doctor.
From a practical point of view, the impediments to the legalization of "assisted suicide" are infinite. What's now? Do you go to the doctor and ask for a lethal injection because you are tired of living? Or is there a list of pathologies that allow this? And what would these pathologies be? Thanks to advances in medical science, almost no pathology is in itself irreversible. Not even depression.
Here the only thing that is irreversible is "assisted suicide": it prevents you from treating yourself and healing, therefore from deciding consciously, i.e. freely, about your life. What if an unscrupulous doctor or nurse then provides the lethal injection without an explicit written request? And what if a relative anxious to inherit tells the doctor that the patient, before falling into a temporary state of unconsciousness, had asked for it to end? (...)
If we meet a guy on the street who is about to jump into the river, what do we do: do we push him or hold him back and try to make him see reason? I want to hope that the natural instinct of all of us is to save him. (...)
After all, the number of suicides is an indicator of unhappiness, not of the "freedom" of a country. And, when there are too many suicides, the task of politics and culture is to question the causes and find remedies. What is the point then of extolling the right to suicide and devising rules that facilitate it? The suicide passed by the National Health Service: have we all gone mad? n
(from il Fatto Quotidiano, 2 December 2011)