Daughter of GP: Change the law to stop terminally ill dying in agony like my mother’

Daughter of campaigning gp calls on MPs to back assisted death bill
Agonising: Dr Ann McPherson died of pancreatic cancer
Josh Pettitt8 July 2014

The family of a GP who championed assisted dying today backed a bill to change “inhumane” laws that stop the terminally ill from ending their lives.

Dr Ann McPherson, founder of Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying and patron of Dignity in Dying, passed away aged 65 at her home in agonising pain after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer.

In the months leading up to her death, she developed an immunity to the effects of morphine, could barely move and was unable to eat solids.

As her condition deteriorated the GP, who had worked with Notting Hill actor Hugh Grant to raise awareness of pancreatic cancer, told her family she wanted to die.

Days before her death in May 2011 she wrote to a friend, saying: “I can’t understand why I have to carry on living like this — why can’t I just die?”

Today her daughter Beth Hale, 38, called on politicians to support Lord Falconer’s assisted dying bill, proposing to allow mentally capable adults, with less than six months to live, to request help in ending their lives.

Mother-of-two Mrs Hale, a solicitor from Bow, said: “The final months of her life really brought home to me how important it was that there should be a change in the law and how inhumane it was not to allow people in her circumstances to die.

“It’s an incredibly difficult thing to watch someone that you love going through that pain and discomfort. She had wonderful treatment, but she just felt so awful for those six months.

“I was eight months’ pregnant when she died and some people would say it was partly a selfish thing, ‘You want her to die rather than have to care for her,’ but there was nothing I wanted more than for her to live long enough to meet my first child.

“As soon as it became clear she was near the end I just felt what we should be able to do is to make that end comfortable. She told us, ‘I don’t want to be here,’ and there was nothing we could do to help and neither could her doctors.

“In a civilised society we help people in every sort of situation but yet we are unwilling to help people in that kind of situation. We have to realise that helping people to die is a form of healthcare. It shouldn’t be seen as a failure to give someone who is terminally ill a good death.”

Lord Falconer’s bill will be debated in the House of Lords on July 18. The Labour peer’s proposal would allow doctors to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients with a “settled intention” to end their lives.

It is illegal to help someone to die, but prosecutors rarely press charges. Lords and MPs will be given a free vote on the bill.

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