Choice is the latest buzz word. In fact, it's been around since Margaret Thatcher's day, but politicians of all persuasions are still shouting about it as if they'd only just come up with the idea.

Of course, we all want to have choices in our lives. We don't want to go into a shop and be faced with just one narrow range of goods, as shoppers used to be in the old Soviet Russia. We want to be able to choose the shoes we like, and the clothes. We want to find a good choice of foods on our supermarket shelves.

But there are times when I'd guess we'd rather not have to make choices. When we're suddenly taken ill, for instance, or diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, we don't want a choice of hospital - or rather we don't want to need a choice of hospital. What we really want is for our local hospital to offer the best possible care, so that we can go there with confidence that we have the best chance of recovery.

Parents don't want to feel they have to move house to find a good school for their children (especially if they know they can't move, for whatever reason); nor do they want to spend hours inspecting schools before filling in forms in the hope that their child will get a place at the one that looks most promising. They'd much prefer to have the best possible school right on their doorstep.

We none of us want to have to waste hours of our precious time examining the small print of commercial pension schemes to try and guess which one will actually leave us with some money in our old age. We want a good, publicly-funded state pension system that lifts the least well-off out of poverty and gives the rest of us a solid basis for our retirement.

On the other hand, there's one huge area where many of us would very much like to have a choice - in the people who govern us. But when they're all saying roughly the same thing what possible choice do we have? We probably end up doing one of two things when it comes to election day: staying at home or voting with a heavy heart for the least worst option.

And now they're talking about offering us yet another opportunity to choose - the ultimate option, you might say, whether to live or die.

Will that mean that those very sick people who decide to continue with life, however painful, however restricted, are going to be regarded as all the more of a burden on those who care for them? That they may even be seen as selfish to want to keep going? I know myself how desperate the elderly often are not to be a burden on their loved ones. Won't this make them feel all the more guilty? If they then choose to end their lives, might it then be from despair rather than because it's what they themselves really want?

I don't know the answer to this one. Watching a loved one die in agony is terrible. But I don't know how I'd feel if I myself were to be terminally ill with some painful condition, though I guess I'd rather have the services of a good hospice than a fatal prescription from the doctor. The only situation where I could conceive of wanting to end my life would be if I were to be struck down by dementia or Alzheimer's - but then I'd be beyond making choices anyway.

No, on balance, I think this is a choice better not put in our hands.

Published: 13/10/2005