Dr. Thomas Finegan:

To allow euthanasia access on the basis we are talking about, where the individual judges that his or her life has lost or is losing value or meaning such that death is preferable, which on one level is an individual judgment people can make and people, in a sense, are free to make since the decriminalisation of suicide, for example, under the 1993 Act, is quite different from giving legal endorsement and healthcare facilitation to that judgment, where it thereby becomes a right, based on a choice and judgment that life does not always have intrinsic, equal, inviolable worth. What was a private personal judgment - a mistaken one, I believe - now becomes publicly endorsed and something whose significance just simply cannot be restricted, either in logic or in practice, to that individual alone. It changes the public healthcare landscape of how life is judged and valued in ways that extend far beyond any cases, no matter how narrowly we may wish to construe them, and it works itself out logically through social practice and attitudes in an expansive manner.

The Deputy mentioned the Swiss model. If I understand it correctly, the Swiss model has not expanded as such because it was never restricted in the sense that it is just simple decriminalisation and there are no grounds that could be expanded. What has expanded is the number of cases annually that take place in Switzerland, so there is expansion.

The current law is at a disadvantage because we are familiar with it. We can see the hard cases that push up against our commitment to the equal and intrinsic value of all human lives and push up against respect for no intentional killing. What we cannot see as clearly is what happens when those two principles are abandoned. They are not abstract. They are instantiated in people and the value of their lives. What follows from that? That is where this idea of restricted euthanasia has an artificially protective affect, screening the fundamental euthanasia rationale from scrutiny. That is why it is so important to think in terms of what are the grounds on which we are basing this idea. What are the grounds for autonomy, rational choice, quality of life? They extend far outwards. Then we can see the hard cases the other side, in Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and elsewhere.