In the futuristic movie "Soylent Green," life is so bad due to overpopulation that people are encouraged to go to suicide centers where they can end their lives comfortably.

Art imitates life:

The founder of the Swiss assistedsuicide clinic Dignitas was criticised yesterday after revealing plans to help a healthy woman to die alongside her terminally ill husband.

Ludwig Minelli described suicide as a “marvellous opportunity” that should not be restricted to the terminally ill or people with severe disabilities. Critics said that the plans highlighted the risks of proposals to legalise assisted suicides in Britain for people in the final stages of a terminal illness.

The Dignitas clinic in Zurich claims to have assisted in the deaths of more than 100 Britons. The Zurich University Clinic found that more than a fifth of people who had died at Dignitas did not have a terminal condition.

Mr Minelli said that anyone who has “mental capacity” should be allowed to have an assisted suicide, claiming that it would save money for the NHS.

Did you get that? Suicide would "save money" for the national health care boondoggle in Great Britain. And that's a reason to encourage suicide?

By definition, someone who seriously contemplates suicide who is healthy otherwise is mentally ill. The short circuiting of the brain's survival mechanism occurs in deep depressions brought on by disease. Clinically depressed people cannot choose suicide because they are not responsible.

And yet, here's this guy pushing people who aren't terminally ill to take the needle and end it all. I would like to point out that assisted suicide opponents have been making this argument for years and been ridiculed for doing so - that helping terminally ill patients end their lives was only the first step down a slippery slope that would one day include healthy people being encouraged to end their lives and even government some day deciding who stays and who goes.

What about that slippery slope now?