Before we tear down this fence - this long-standing prohibition against assisted dying, enshrined in statute and reinforced by centuries of legal precedent - we must first ask why it was built. Not merely as a moral prohibition, but as a social technology: a device to preserve the delicate equilibrium between compassion and control, mercy and menace, the individual’s plea and the state’s duty to protect the vulnerable. The Crown Prosecution Service’s current review of thirteen suspected cases is not, in itself, a crisis. It is a routine application of law. But the political and moral momentum gathering around it - the sense that these thirteen cases are somehow emblematic of an unjust system, that their prosecution reveals a moral failure - bears a striking resemblance to the revolutionary logic I observed in France, where the first cry of liberty swiftly became the first decree of terror.

The law against assisted suicide does not, as its critics allege, compel a man to suffer beyond the limits of human endurance. It does not deny the reality of pain, nor the sanctity of dignity in death. What it denies is the slippery slope we have seen in every jurisdiction where it has been nudged aside: the gradual redefinition of who may request death, and under what conditions. In the early days of reform, the is always drawn at the terminally ill, the utterly incapacitated, the hopelessly suffering. Yet once the principle is conceded - that a person may lawfully request another to end his life - the boundary begins to bleed. It moves outward: to the chronically ill, to the disabled, to the elderly who feel themselves a burden, to the depressed whose despair is not irremediable but treatable. The principle, once released, demands expansion; the exception, once permitted, becomes the rule.

This is not speculation. It is the logic of precedent, the same logic that guided the French revolutionaries when they abolished the monarchy and, in the name of equality, built a system where the Committee of Public Safety could decree who lived and who died - not because they were evil men, but because they believed their principle was pure, and that nature, once corrected, would not tolerate half-measures. The prohibition against assisted dying is not a relic of Puritan morality; it is a firewall against a social contagion of despair. It says, in effect: your suffering matters, but your life matters more - not because we value it highly, but because we value all lives equally, and we will not allow the value of one to be determined by the whim of another, however well-intentioned.

What do the reformers overlook? They overlook the latent function of the law: not to punish, but to protect. The law does not stand between a man and his mercy; it stands between a vulnerable man and the well-meaning friend, the anxious relative, the overburdened carer - who, under pressure of time, grief, or economic strain, may begin to believe that death is the kindest option. It is not the dying man who most needs protection; it is the man who is not yet dying, but who feels he soon will be, and who has learned to equate dependence with worthlessness. The law says, silently but firmly: You shall not be killed, even if you ask for it. That is not cruelty; it is the last, faint pulse of a social contract that says: we will not let the weak be persuaded to die by the strong, however gently.

I do not deny the gravity of suffering. I have seen men broken by illness, not by principle. But the remedy for suffering is not always to end the sufferer - it is to strengthen the society that lets him suffer alone. The law against assisted dying is not a denial of compassion; it is a demand for a more profound compassion - one that insists on presence, on care, on vigilance, on the slow, unglamorous work of tending to the fragile. To dismantle it is not to liberate the dying; it is to surrender the living to a new kind of abandonment: the abandonment of the principle that no one should be permitted to decide, even with kindness, that another’s life is no longer worth living.

The thirteen cases under review are not evidence of a broken system. They are evidence of a system trying, as it must, to apply a principle to complex, messy human realities. The danger lies not in the prosecution of one man or another, but in the transformation of such cases into moral test cases - into proof that the law itself is the villain. When that happens, the reformers, however well-meaning, become the agents of a revolution they do not fully comprehend: a revolution that begins with mercy and ends with the quiet acceptance of death as a solution to problems that could otherwise be solved by time, care, and a society willing to bear its own weakness.