A husband has walked free from a British court after helping his seriously disabled wife to commit suicide. He was given a nine-month suspended jail sentence. A “devoted husband”, David March found one day last year that his wife had taken Valium and had placed a plastic bag over her head. She was suffering from multiple sclerosis. He tightened the string around the bag and she died half an hour later.

Predictably, the decision was controversial. The UK’s euthanasia lobby, Dignity in Dying, welcomed it, but a spokesman for the British Council for Disabled People asked: “what kind of message is this sending out to society where it is perceived to be easier to kill a disabled person rather than support them to live with dignity?”

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Michael Cook

Michael Cook edits BioEdge, a bioethics newsletter, and MercatorNet, an on-line magazine whose focus is human dignity. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

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