Is helping a terminally ill loved one die with dignity murder or compassion? Could assisted suicide open the floodgates to society ridding itself of elderly people, invalids and the disabled, because they are surplus to requirements? Should our government, whose armies kill in the name of democracy and freedom, reserve the right to prosecute people who help others voluntarily kill themselves?

It’s a thorny dilemma; and we haven’t even begun to take into account the Catholic church’s unswerving condemnation of suicide.

Why bring up the subject of assisted suicide now? Because it’s in the news again, as multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy takes her case to the House of Lords. She wants to know whether her husband will be prosecuted if he accompanies her to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland where, when her condition becomes unbearable, she will be helped to die. If her husband is prosecuted and found guilty under the Suicide Act 1961 of aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring her suicide, he could face 14 years in jail.

Saimo Chahal, a human rights and public law partner at London firm Bindmans, represented Purdy in a June 2008 hearing at the Divisional Court. She said (see [2008] Gazette, 19 June, 5): ‘The UK needs a modern, forward-thinking law on assisted suicide similar to certain other countries which give greater autonomy to individuals to make decisions about… the manner of their own death’.

In December 2008, the Gazette (see [2008] Gazette, 18 December, 4) also reported the case of the parents of Daniel James, 23, who was left tetraplegic after an accident during a rugby game. They accompanied their son to Dignitas, where he took his own life, and were questioned by the police upon their return to the UK. Their solicitor, Adrian Harling, managing partner at Kidderminster firm Painters, was able to argue successfully that prosecuting them would not have been in the public interest. No charges were brought.

Unless the law changes, there are likely to be plenty more attempted or actual prosecutions. Denis Campbell in the Observer (31 May 2009) reported that almost 800 Britons have become members of Dignitas. The clinic’s figures show 15 Britons died there in 2003, 26 in 2006 and 23 in the last 12 months.

The Lords’ judgment will have to address ethical issues, while taking into account that the world has moved on since 1961. Medicine has transformed itself in the last 48 years, for example, and fewer of us are swayed by religious beliefs. We await their judgment with interest.