The strange jig around the matter of assisted suicide continues. Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, has published interim guidelines that are open for consultation. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Starmer says:

We are proud of the way we temper justice with mercy. The decision not to prosecute provides essential flexibility to prosecutors ... the critical question I have considered is: what are the circumstances in which it is or is not in the public interest to prosecute a person against whom there is enough evidence to support the criminal offence of assisted suicide?

The problem, however, is that in these guidelines, where there should be clarity, confusion multiplies and a startling lack of understanding of the origins of compassion and empathy is revealed.

According to the guidelines, family members who help a relative or partner to commit suicide when they are not suffering from a terminal disease (Alzheimer's, for instance, is not terminal) are more likely to be prosecuted. Why? A person will also be prosecuted if the person who kills himself is under 18, suffers from a mental illness or has a learning difficulty. (That seems a reasonable decision not least because it might be difficult to distinguish where "assistance" stops and execution begins.)

Another deceptively simple criteria is whether those who assist stand to gain financially. The original headline on a news story in the Times obviously conveyed a little too much of the Del Trotters for some tastes. "What's in it for you?" it read. A more restrained wording appeared in later editions, "Assisted suicide investigations will focus on who stood to benefit".

Of course, if someone decides to call it a day, who stands to gain has to be an issue and Starmer has said that someone who was "kindly acting with compassion and assisting someone who had a clear and settled intent to commit suicide" would be less likely to prosecuted. However, it might have helped if the guidelines had opted for a different emphasis in their wording not least in the name of compassion.

We live in what both Conservative and Labour governments like to call "a property-owning democracy".

As a result, the "who benefits?" clause could criminalise a swath of people (including me) who might want to support a parent who expresses the wish to opt out, but who still has a little left to live. Relatives who wish to help a parent to die may weep tears of blood but that still won't erase the money in the bank from the sale of a father or mother's hard-earned semi. For the first time, those who do not belong to the middle or upper classes are enjoying their hitherto exclusive perk: a parent leaving behind a property, however modest.

The new guidelines have been prompted by the law lords backing the case of Debbie Purdy. Purdy, who has MS, called for a customised policy statement on whether people who help someone to commit suicide will be prosecuted. Starmer told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that if an individual had a clear and settled intention to kill themselves, if an individual was assisted rather than encouraged to end his or her life, there would be no prosecution. But if the person who assists gained benefit from the suicide, the situation became murkier. Starmer explained:

The general approach we have taken is to steer a careful course between protecting the vulnerable from those who might gain from hastening their death but also identifying those cases where nobody thinks it is in the public interest to prosecute.

According to Gordon Brown, in a speech in 2005, more than two-thirds of the adult population own their own homes. Admittedly, that number may have been reduced by a combination of the recession, the cost of nursing home care and/or the baby boomers' apparent intention to spend, spend, spend their way to their final resting place, leaving nothing for the children. (A 2007 survey for AA Legal Services of 2,600 elderly parents and adult children revealed that 70% of offspring fear that they will inherit only their roistering parents' debts.)

Nevertheless, some money will remain for some people – and should they find themselves in the horrendous situation in which they are asked by a parent to assist in his or her suicide, those sons and daughters will plunge into exactly the kind of confusing mess that these latest guidelines were supposed to clear up. They could find themselves in a court of law.

The DPP has been exercising discretion for years – that's why no prosecutions have resulted from the deaths of 115 Britons who have died in Dignitas's clinic since 1998. Once the guidelines are published, ironically, the police and the DPP may be obliged to take action where before compassion was exercised.

With or without guidelines, assisted suicide is an area obviously open to abuse. The elderly can and will be "encouraged" to end their lives by the few who are unscrupulous. At the same time, as our population ages, choosing when to make an exit will be regarded as a consumer's right by individuals reared in a society in which market forces dominate and the customer is always correct.

Arguments about God's will and the publication of foggy guidelines aren't sufficient to cope with the challenges ahead. What's required is proper parliamentary debate and intelligent legislation that also considers euthanasia. Death is a taboo for the generation who grew up in the war – not least because many witnessed its arrival when they were young and in their prime. The postwar generation, witnessing the impact of terminal diseases and dementia on their ageing relatives, talk about it much more openly. Many still fear it but, rightly or wrongly, what my friends and I fear more is turning into husks of humanity with no quick way out.

I have three relatives, including my father, suffering terribly from Alzheimer's disease and a great aunt of 108 who is compos mentis but has had enough. I have no wish to hang around in either state.

In an interview with Stephen Moss in G2, Starmer describes listening to the interview police conducted with the mother of Daniel James, the 23-year-old who was paralysed from the chest down. His parents took him to Dignitas to die. She is asked by the police, "Didn't you think you might be committing a crime?" She replied, "You just don't understand, do you?"

With or without guidelines, people will do the right thing. Purdy asked that the worry about what might happen after assisting a suicide should be lifted from relatives. I'm not sure it has.