Mal Fletcher comments

Indeed with some aged care facilities, this has already proven to be the case. Procedures for patient care have been trimmed to balance the books of private enterprise 'care providers'.

The 'business' side of the equation has taken over the duty of care.

Many will argue that assisted death should only be legalised if the procedures are to be carried out in government-run, publicly owned facilities, by highly trained and accredited professionals. Not so long ago, we were saying that about aged care homes.

The private, profit-seeking sector will always look for ways to engage with the growing edge of new social phenomena.

What makes us think that we wouldn't soon see the emergence of a profit-making industry devoted to ending life, where the business of dying is more important than the duty of care?

It is inevitable that more organisations like Dignitas will emerge as privately owned death clinics. There is, to be sure, a healthy income to be made from trading in the promise of a comfortable death.

If assisted death were legalised in Britain, it may only be a matter of time before we saw elegant death 'boutiques' - though they obviously wouldn't be branded that way - offering a cosy demise to members of the well-heeled classes.

This would soon be followed by less scrupulous companies offering a scaled back version to the poorer classes.

When interviewed, advocates of assisted dying almost invariably express motivations based on the fear of a worsening physical or mental condition.

Let's be in no doubt about this: it is usually the fear of suffering, not actual suffering itself, that is at the core of the debate about assisted dying.

Much wider and more representative studies than the BBC programme have revealed that it is not the onset of pain that causes people to request assisted death. It is the anticipation of suffering or debilitation that drives most of those who consider this drastic course of action.

Emotional trauma rather than physical pain have given rise to the decision to die.

The Netherlands was among the first European nations to introduce liberal euthanasia laws. According to a study undertaken by a major Dutch University a few years ago, only five percent of patients who decided to go through with doctor-assisted suicide listed pain as the biggest factor in their decision.

The most prominent factor was the fear of suffering - and twenty-four percent of the people surveyed said that fear of humiliation was their strongest motivation. (At the time of the study, more than a third of all euthanasia cases in that nation were AIDS related.)