Given that each chapter in the book has its own conclusions, this concluding chapter will be brief, and confine itself to drawing together some of the main threads of the argument the book has advanced against legalising VAE or PAS.

Part VI highlighted a corner of the euthanasia debate which is too often overlooked – passive euthanasia – and argued that it deserves greater consideration, not least in view of cases such as Bland and the guidance produced by the BMA. If it is wrong intentionally to kill patients by an act, why should doctors be allowed intentionally to kill patients by withholding or withdrawing treatment or tube-feeding? Is it not gravely inconsistent for the law to prohibit doctors from administering a lethal injection to a patient at the patient's request, but to allow doctors intentionally to starve a patient to death without request? Although the bulk of this book has been concerned with VAE rather than PE, intellectually consistent opposition to the former requires opposition to the latter.

The Introduction noted that many people support the legalisation of VAE and/or PAS. Those people, many of whom have seen their loved ones die in distress, campaign for the law to be relaxed to allow doctors actively and intentionally to hasten the deaths of competent patients who freely request death as a last resort to avoid unbearable suffering.