Supporters of the right to die and opponents of euthanasia have staged rival protests outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London before a legal challenge aimed at changing the law on medically assisted dying.
The legal claim is being brought on behalf of Noel Conway, a retired lecturer who has motor neurone disease and says he feels “entombed” by his illness. Conway, 68, from Shrewsbury, who is now too ill to attend court, wants to be able to choose when his life should end with the help of doctors.
He is arguing for a change in the law so that when he has a prognosis of less than six months left to live, and still has the mental capacity to make the decision and has made a “voluntary, clear, settled and informed” decision, he should be able to receive medical help to end his life.
The campaign is being supported by Dignity in Dying. One of its members, Tom Spicer, who accompanied his terminally ill mother to a Dignitas clinic in Switzerland two years ago where she died, said: “She would have wanted to go at home, in her own country. It cost her £12,000 to make all the arrangements to go to Dignitas.
“She died peacefully. Not changing the law [to enable medically-assisted dying in the UK] means that it is the poor who are going to suffer most. We are forcing people to suffer in inhumane ways and forcing them out of the country. She didn’t want to have do it secretly so that the only way she could inform her friends and family was by letter after she had died.”
On the opposite side of the entrance to the court building, protesters from Distant Voices erected mock gravestones commemorating disabled people whose lives, they alleged, would be put at risk if assisted dying were permitted in the UK. Alfie Kenward, a member of the group, said: “We would like the law to remain as it is or to have more safeguards.”
One of the issues the court of appeal is considering is whether the safeguards proposed by Conway’s lawyers to enable him to receive medical assistance to die would sufficiently protect weak and vulnerable people.
In a statement before the hearing, Conway said he was now dependent on a ventilator for up to 23 hours a day and had movement only in his right hand, head and neck. He said his options were to “effectively suffocate” by choosing to remove his ventilator, or spend thousands of pounds travelling to Switzerland to end his life and have his family risk prosecution.
The hearing continues.
