'Pro-life' commentators make the explicit assertion - THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A HUMAN LIFE NOT WORTH LIVING and, if the word 'worth' is taken seriously, then ALL human life is for us to sustain as far as is humanly possible.

It follows from this that we have a definite, clear and inescapable general duty which can be 'unpacked' to reveal particular duties both negative and positive.

If we have such an absolute duty to sustain human life, then we are wrong to kill ourselves or one another. Suicide is wrong (whether, or not, any given case can be described as voluntary euthanasia is irrelevant) : assisted suicide, purposeful omission of feasible life-sustaining steps, war, capital punishment - these are all wrong GIVEN that one accepts the basic pro-life assertion set out above.

Moreover, both the human foetus and the patient in the persistent vegetative state are just as much instances of human life as are the rest of us and so procured abortion and deliberate withdrawal of life-support are both wrong.

These conclusions - drawn inexorably from the pro-life assertion - are, in many cases and in many circumstances, deeply counter-intuitive to many conscientious and informed people . So we are driven inexorably to deny that assertion and to acknowledge that THERE IS INDEED SUCH A THING AS A HUMAN LIFE THAT IS NOT WORTH LIVING. From this it follows that we must try to identify the circumstances in which it is not worth sustaining a life and, what is more, we have to face the reality that there are no absolute certainties, no risk-free decisions waiting to be taken. That is what we have to think about if we are not absolute pacifists, not opponents of suicide in any circumstances whatever, not categorically against capital punishment and not totally opposed to procuring abortion or 'mercy killing' in any circumstances at all.

Each of these mutually exclusive assertions - both the absolute claim that survival is intrinsically valuable and the less than absolute view that survival can only be instrumentally valuable (and can, on balance, be not even that in some cases) - presents problems.

You can only really sustain the pro-life assertion, when it is against the plain dictates of common sense, by invoking the supernatural in some form - perhaps the hope for a miracle in this world or perhaps the hope for a better next world for us to live in if we act rightly in this one.

Those who urged a woman to persist in an octuplet pregnancy, despite the huge odds against a satisfactory long-term outcome, could only do so on supernatural assumptions - that a miracle might lead to eight healthy children or that the soul of the hapless woman might go to hell if she did not resist the temptation to abort some or all of the eight.

What if there is actually no factual basis for such hopes?

The counter-assertion (that life can indeed be not worth living) is all very well but how can we KNOW that the situation of the life, currently deemed to be hopeless, cannot become hopeful in the light of our ever-increasing knowhow? We cannot KNOW this for certain. Ought the man who smothered his terminally suffering brother (at the latter's urgent insistence) not to have waited for a miracle cure? Has the suicide wish, and the act of killing in response to that wish, meant that those concerned cannot be accepted in heaven?

Belief in such supernatural possibilities is strictly optional.

Crudely put, it is a gamble; do I bet on a miracle now and a better life in the hereafter or do I bet on not making a mistake in ending a life, mine or otherwise, that might, just might, have become worth living contrary to all reasonable this-worldly expectations?

Having no wish to gamble on a problematic supernatural I prefer to gamble on an admittedly fallible human decision that a given life ought, for the best, to be ended.

Can we see reasonable ethical guidelines about actively, or by deliberate omission, ending a human life.

It would take a full-length book to deal adequately with such matters. (Interested persons might do worse than read Jonathan Glover - see footnote) but some things might be worth saying briefly on abortion and euthanasia from a plain godless view of these things.

My general view of procured abortion was set out in a recent letter to the local press - as follows:

"It seems to me that there are four parties involved in a normal human pregnancy - the woman, the man, society and the foetus. The first three are differently placed from the fourth; they can all speak for themselves, they can all claim rights and they all can be said to have duties. The foetus is differently placed; it has no voice or vote of its own - and pro-life people are, I think, quite right to say so in so many words.

The rest of us have to try to speak for the foetus and this is where I differ from the pro-life dogmatists. It is sheer presumption, when trying to speak up for the interest of the foetus, to take for granted that survival is in its best interest. This is not self-evidently always the case - so far as one can judge.

The fact is that a baby, as a potential adult person, has two overriding interests, two primary needs; one is the need to be wanted, valued, loved; the other is to have a mother, natural or adoptive, who can reasonably expect to provide the child with the material necessities of life to a sufficient extent.

Abortion is often presented as a matter of a woman's right - as indeed I think it is - but ought we not to go further and say that any pregnant woman, who cannot truly and reasonably say both that she wants the baby and that she can see her way to providing for its material needs, may actually have a duty to opt for abortion. There are too many unwanted unsupported children as it is; they are likely to have, or to cause, terrible problems. Perhaps society's unloved, unsupported children should never have been born.

Unless we face this problem honestly we may yet be in the Latin American situation of having street children being treated as vermin to be shot for fun by, for instance, any trigger-happy off-duty policeman. If we are not careful, pro-life can boil down to cheap life".

As for euthanasia, we can only really speak for ourselves. It seems to me to be highly improbable that death will come - by any of various means, illness, accident or whatever - at precisely the right time. Almost always one can truly say, of a death, either that the person had some meaningful life yet to be lived (death came regrettably too soon) or that meaningful life had ended, perhaps, some months before death 'caught up' with that reality (death came regrettably too late).

Speaking for myself, death somewhat too soon is far preferable to death too late. I therefore reserve the right to voluntary euthanasia, I reserve the right to request assistance in this if such is what I need and that, while I would respect anyone's extreme reluctance to help me to die, I would regard it is an assault to seek to impose survival upon me merely because of someone else's belief that survival is intrinsically (rather than merely instrumentally) valuable.

That's what I think. What about your thoughts?

Jonathan Glover's book is called 'CAUSING DEATH AND SAVING LIVES',
published by Penguin ISBN 0-14-013479-4.

or e-mail to stockton.sanday.orkney@zetnet.co.uk