Law on assisted dying is inhuman, says GP with cancer

Ann McPherson says assisted dying guidelines are inadequate because they rule out a professional role

Dr Ann McPherson, a 64-year-old GP from Oxford, does not have long to live. Fourteen years after being diagnosed with breast cancer, she now has terminal pancreatic cancer, with secondary cancer in her lungs. She is no longer receiving treatment and takes only the painkiller morphine.

"The prognosis is that I am going to die in the next weeks or months," she said today. "Assisted dying is something I have considered. I have no idea if I want it, that depends on how my dying goes. But I want it to be there.

"I don't want to go to Zurich, to some anonymous facility; I would want to do it in my own bed. I have a husband, three children and five grandchildren and I would like them to be there if that is the route I go down, though I don't want them to be directly involved. A professional should be able to do that."

McPherson, who still works as a GP, believes the Crown Prosecution Service guidelines are inadequate because they rule out a professional role, and said politicians should change the law.

"I feel very strongly that palliative care should include assisted dying," she said. "I call it assisted dying, not assisted suicide, because suicide has connotations of something bad, running away. I think the law is inhuman as it stands and I think the ­public is ahead of the lawmakers on this."

She is understandably to the point when talking about her predicament; she has a lot she wants to do before she dies. But she has taken the time to ­campaign on the issue. "For me, at the moment, there is the need to achieve a balance between living as normal a life as possible and making the very most of my last living days as I wait to die," she wrote in the British Medical Journal. "Why can't people have a rational discussion about assisted dying? Why can't assisted dying be available in Britain for those who want it as a choice?

"And why, oh why is the BMA opposed to physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia? Surely by now our culture has developed enough humanity to provide the choice and still protect the vulnerable.

"Developments in palliative care, and arguments over assisted death, have raised the possibility of being able to see dying as something to be respected and celebrated: a fulfilling experience rather than a technological failure."

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