But people — patients — have always suffered. Surely, the "need" now for assisted suicide is far smaller than at any time before a century ago, when doctors could do nothing for almost anything? Never has medicine been better able to deal with disease, either at a mechanistic or a symptomatic level. The implication, then, is that it is our threshold for suffering that has changed — or more subtly, our perception of our threshold for suffering. 

We may well be no feebler than previous generations when we actually suffer and heroism has not died. But we are less prepared to accept the possibility of suffering. Neither does one need to argue that there is a positive good in suffering — a dispassionate position too easily caricatured as arrogant, complacent, out-of-touch, even faintly ridiculous. For whatever reason, there is an increasing perception that suffering must be avoidable.

So in both questions, at either end of life, suffering sits on one side of the scales, and apparent means of avoiding suffering — assisted dying or harvesting stem cells from an embryo to develop treatments — on the other. And in both cases, the proposed means of avoiding suffering are historically proscribed. But our collective wish to avoid suffering, or belief that it is no longer at all appropriate or acceptable, has contributed increased weight to this side of the balance, and the scales are radically tilting.