‘We need more compassion’: UK families call for assisted dying reform

According to his son, for the 10 years after Norman Ward was diagnosed with prostate cancer at the age of 60, “you wouldn’t have known he was unwell”. But eventually, the cancer “spread everywhere”. Then he had a stroke.

“It was all going wrong,” said Gareth Ward of his father. “He had been very independent. As long as he could go down the pub and walk his dog, he was happy. But he was in an awful lot of pain for a long time. He got thinner and weaker, and he had to take morphine all the time. He looked like he was already dead, and no one had told him.”

One day, Norman called his son and said he couldn’t have another night like the one that had just passed. “He was very matter of fact, and said he was going to shoot himself, and then he hung up. He knew exactly what he was saying and doing.”

Ward’s stomach dropped. His father had a licensed shotgun locked away in the attic of his house. He called 999 and also his sisters, who lived near Norman. One sister reached the house before the police, and found her father’s body in a garden chair. He was 75.

“People shouldn’t have to do what my dad did. But he was in a world of pain and it was only going to get worse. My dad decided to put himself down,” he said.

Since his father’s death, Ward has joined the campaign in favour of allowing assisted dying for people with terminal illnesses. “We need more compassion,” he said.

This week, MPs published a report on what they described as this “difficult, sensitive and yet crucial subject”. It came amid growing calls for a change in the law, triggered in part by celebrity interventions from Dame Diana Rigg, Dame Harriet Walter and Dame Esther Rantzen, who has described the current law on assisted dying as a “mess”.

More than 130,000 people signed a petition calling for a parliamentary debate and vote on assisted dying. The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, who could be prime minister by the end of the year, has backed a call for a change in the law. Campaigners point to overwhelming support among the public, and say the mood among MPs has significantly shifted since the last vote in 2015.

The MPs’ report laid out evidence on assisted dying, and reflected arguments both for and against. Its intention was to provide a useful resource for debate on the issue.

Gordon Macdonald, the chief executive of Care Not Killing, which represents more than 40 organisations opposed to assisted dying, said he was disappointed that MPs had not “come down firmly” against changing the law.

“MPs could have decided to firmly close the door on assisted suicide and euthanasia,” he said, “and say the current law, which protects everyone regardless of whether they are young or old, able bodied or disabled, should remain. They failed.”

From the other side of the debate, Sarah Wootton, the chief executive of Dignity in Dying, said the report “shifts the prospect of an assisted dying law for the UK from a hypothetical to a reality. It acknowledges that law change is coming down the track in the British Isles and rightly calls on the government to engage in this debate.

“If MPs take just one thing from the mountains of evidence heard in this inquiry, it’s that the current law on assisted dying is unsafe and woefully inadequate. Palliative care is simply not enough to give everyone a peaceful death, forcing terminally ill Britons to contemplate taking their own lives or seek compassion in Switzerland.”

The report points out that the proportion of the UK population over the age of 65, and therefore more likely to suffer from terminal illnesses, is rising sharply. According to government statistics, there will be an additional 7.5 million over-65s within 50 years.

Although the UK is a “world leader” in palliative and end-of-life care, provision is patchy, according to the report. Dr Paul Perkins, the chief medical director at the charity Sue Ryder, told the MPs’ inquiry: “I am constantly surprised that as a society it is OK for us to have to sell second-hand cardigans to be able to look after seriously ill people. If people thought that you had to sell second-hand cardigans for their cancer surgery, I don’t think that would be acceptable.”

But even outstanding palliative care was not enough in some cases. One person told the inquiry that their wife’s cancer “​proved resistant to all treatment options, including rather heroic neurosurgery … Her treatment, including specialist palliative care, had been excellent throughout, but she’d simply had enough. And she actually said to me: ‘They treat cats and dogs better than humans.’ And it wasn’t that she was in pain. She just felt dreadful all the time and she knew this was only going one way.”

Dr Stephen Duckworth told the inquiry that as a severely disabled person, he had been strongly opposed to assisted dying until he sat on the Commission on Assisted Dying, which reported in 2012. “The evidence that emerged from this commission resulted in me changing my mind,” he said.

He added: “A terminally ill person requesting an assisted death is not choosing between living and dying. They are choosing between two different ways of dying: either enduring avoidable suffering or a peaceful death surrounded by family and friends celebrating life.”

Pippa Stone lived for 18 days after her brain tumour was diagnosed at the age of 60, but those days would “haunt me for the rest of my life”, said her daughter, Josie Kemp. “She deteriorated a lot quicker than we expected. It was so undignified, not the end of life anyone would want.

“She cried and told us that she just wanted to die. She was in nappies, she lost her speech, she lost the ability to swallow. And there was nothing that anyone could do about it. She was on the maximum medication she could be on. It was a very traumatic experience for everyone,” she added.

Her mother would “definitely have wanted an assisted death if it was available. Her life could have ended while she could still speak and had her dignity.” Kemp now campaigns for a change in the law on assisted dying. “Everyone is one horrific death away from wanting this to happen,” she said.