Why the assistance with the ultimate choice should be made legal...

This post is a bit off the usual topics for me, but I was incredibly moved to read the story of Daniel James in Saturday's Guardian.

As someone who has played rugby on the front row of the scrum, I have seen at first-hand how a mere slip on sodden turf can lead to serious injury. The hooker position, which James played, is set up such that he would not have been able to use his hands to break his fall.

Within the game of rugby, following a similar injury in incredibly similar circumstances to rising star prop Matt Hampson, analyses have been done and changes have been made to the game's laws in an attempt to make this area of the game safer.

However, what has happened to the tragic Danial James shows that no changes can ever take away the risk of such accidents happening. While the above linked interview with Matt Hampson details the tremendous courage with which he has faced his life-changing injury, others like Daniel James can think only of what has been taken from them.

Is this wrong of people in that situation? I feel not. It's a cliche, but nonetheless true, that each of us deals with personal tragedy in different ways, and none of us can say with certainty what we would do in similar circumstances. The only time we know for certain is when we are forced to confront those circumstances.

Daniel James, being, as the Guardian article states, of sound judgement to the satisfaction of his parents, had felt his body had become a 'prison' and that he no longer wanted to 'live what he felt was a second-class life'. Therefore he sought assistance to end his own life, and had to travel to Switzerland to do it. His parents accompanied him, probably in the full knowledge that doing so would criminalise them in England. However, their love for their son meant they could do nothing else but support his bid to end his own life.

And now? Now the police are investigating whether a prosecution can be brought against his parents.

Given the advancements we have made in law over one's own jurisdiction over one's body, the realm of assisted suicide remains one of the last areas where a person of sound mind has no jurisdiction. I support Dignity in Dying's campaign to allow terminally ill and mentally competent people to choose to end their own life.

However, I would like to see this extended to people, like Daniel James, who have had an exceptionally negative change in life circumstances visited upon them, and who wish, with assistance, to end their life because of it. The James family have acted with dignity. That that law dictates Daniel James' parents are to be potentially criminalised shows the continuing indignity of the law.

When it boils down to it, none of us can choose the fact that we exist. In this era of the 'choice agenda', I think the minimum we should expect is a choice, when circumstances dictate, on when our existence ends.