Sir Terry Pratchett reaches Emmerdale...

The issue of assisted dying has been with us in a high profile manner continuously for some years now. Whether your cultural tastes lie in good old Auntie Beeb or the Yorkshire Dales of a soap opera, the issue of assisted dying has confronted us all.

The main argument seems to lie in the belief in freedom of choice and of the importance of being able to make your own decisions before decisions are made for you.

From where I'm standing, it looks as if talking about freedom of choice is an illusion we think we possess when we don't.

To live in any kind of community and to live in any kind of relationship with others or to exist within any kind of wider society means that we are part of something greater than ourselves. Our choices are bound within the constraints of our responsibilities towards others.

As Christians, our first responsibility is clear: We are to care for the needs of others more than defending their right to choose to do as they please. This is because the relationships we have with others, the communities within which we live, and the wider society of which we are part would all collapse at the least, and leave everyone in pain of one kind or another if we could all do as we choose.

Apart from what I feel to be the teaching of the Christian faith on this matter, this is an opinion at which I have arrived through experience also. Aside from the pastoral situations which I have encountered in my work where people have been chronically and terminally ill, when members of my own family have been chronically or terminally ill, assisted dying has been the last of my thoughts. Instead, helping carry the responsibility of care has been the thing most in my mind.

There must also be a realisation that people changing does not in itself give rise to an argument in favour of assisted dynig. The truth of the matter is that we change as people throughout the course of our lives from infancy to death. We are not the same people that we were ten or twenty years ago and we will not be the same people in ten or twenty years' time. To change is to be human, and to change is how human beings are meant live and die, for that matter. We are born helpless and we might die helpless, which is why we are human beings.