It is only during my lifetime that suicide ceased to be a criminal act. Amazingly, until 1961 anyone attempting and failing to end their own life could be prosecuted and imprisoned. It is a myth that it was ever a capital offence in this country, or indeed any other, in the two millennia since the Roman Emperor Hadrian tried to prevent soldiers from committing suicide (as a means of avoiding having to fight and die in battle), by making their attempt punishable by death.

Even countries that have been what we choose to call ‘civilised’ for less time than us regard the act of trying to terminate one’s own life as evidence that a person needs help rather than punishment. Many argue, with some justification, that one’s own life is something over which the individual alone should have ultimate control and the right to decide to stop living, for whatever reason, is no different essentially from the corresponding right to choose to live.

Religions however, worldwide, take a different view. If we have been given life by a god, then (they argue) only that god has the right to take it away. It is for this reason that we find ourselves in a position where those who are physically unable to end their own lives, through complete incapacity, are unable to ask others to assist them to end the lives that have become intolerable and incurably painful.

The case of Tony Nicklinson, who spent seven years paralysed from the neck down, highlights for many the cruelty of a blanket ban on allowing the terminally and painfully ill assistance in hastening their ends rather than prolong their agony. Mercifully six days after hearing that the High Court could not allow him to authorise his own painless demise at the hands of sympathetic friends or family, nature intervened and his two thousand days of torment are over. Who can be other than thankful on his behalf? Clearly it would be unwise to make assisted suicide too easy, for fear of the few abuses that might subsequently occur. The vulnerable must be protected. But in those most extreme cases of demonstrable agony and torment, it must be possible somehow to allow a gentle passage into that dark night. In the multicultural, secular society we live in, the only consideration should be the protection of the weak not the prevention of the determined.