bioethics
Should People Be Prosecuted for Assisting a Suicide?
LNAT Section B · Model essay
The essay prompt
Should the criminal law continue to prosecute those who help a person with an incurable, degenerative illness to end their own life, when that person has a settled and competent wish to die?
The stance
No, compassionate assistance should not, as a rule, be prosecuted. Where a competent adult with a degenerative or terminal condition makes a settled, voluntary request to die, a relative, friend or clinician who helps them should not face the criminal courts. The criminal law exists to punish harm to others, not to punish mercy that honours an autonomous choice; the current settlement, in which a blanket offence is softened only by prosecutorial discretion, is both unprincipled and unequal. The right response is to channel these cases through clinical safeguards, not a 14-year prison sentence, and the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill now before Parliament shows that statutory regulation, not prosecution, is the legitimate route.
The case for
Autonomy and dignity: prosecuting compassionate assistance punishes respect for a competent person's final choice.
The core of dignity is authorship of one's own life, and that authorship reaches its end. A competent adult with a degenerative disease who decides, after reflection, that their suffering is no longer bearable is exercising the same self-determination the law respects everywhere else. Article 8 ECHR protects that autonomy: in Pretty v United Kingdom the Strasbourg Court accepted that the way a person chooses to pass the closing moments of life is part of private life. To send a spouse or carer who honoured that choice to prison treats compassion as though it were violence, and strips both helper and patient of dignity at the moment they need it most.
The case against
Sanctity of life and the deterrent function: the criminal prohibition protects the vulnerable and marks a moral line.
On this view the law's first duty is to protect life, and a serious criminal offence is what holds that line. Even if individual prosecutions are rare, the standing threat of a 14-year sentence deters relatives with mixed motives and signals that the state will not treat any life as disposable. Remove the offence, the argument runs, and elderly or disabled people will feel a quiet duty to die so as not to be a burden, and the protective wall around the most vulnerable will be breached one compassionate case at a time.
Elite unlocks every LNAT Section B model essay in full — the worked argument, steel-manned counters, verified authorities and the founder's own plan behind each one.
Sign up and unlockThe founder's own plan for this essay
The exact plan this essay was built from — the founder's working notes before the model answer was written.
Elite unlocks every LNAT Section B model essay in full — the worked argument, steel-manned counters, verified authorities and the founder's own plan behind each one.
Sign up and unlockGenerate a model essay from this plan
Turn this plan into a finished essay, instantly.
Elite turns the founder's plan into a complete, 500–600 word Section B model essay written to the structure above — a clear stance, distinct points, a steel-manned counter and a tight finish. Generate, read, regenerate.
Sign up and unlock