An end to suffering

diana athill is 90. She hopes this book will help make euthanasia legal and release ‘mercy killers’ from unnecessary pain

Almost 70 years ago a woman who expected me to become her daughter-in-law told me an astonishing and solemn secret: when her beloved husband, dying of an excruciatingly painful cancer, implored his doctor to kill him and the doctor refused, she did it. Terrible though the experience was, she said, she had never regretted it. And some 30 years later another woman told me she had done the same thing for her desperate mother, and she too was sure that what she had done was right.

And I have never doubted that they were. I can't think of anything more appalling than having to make such a decision about someone I loved - or about anyone, for that matter - but any person who has no prospect of recovery and is in such agony, mental or physical, that he or she is driven to beg for

release into death, should be granted that release.

This book, which is very carefully balanced, takes into account all the arguments, none of which can be lightly dismissed, which keep the law in this country unchanged and forbid people like the late Diane Pretty to get the help they ask for without causing some compassionate assistant to become a criminal. It is also fully aware of the problems which would be involved in drafting a new law, given the complex safeguards which would have to be built into it: indeed, it is hard to imagine a subject for which it has become more difficult to legislate.

Yet the Dutch have achieved, since 2002, a system which appears to be workable, and so in their different ways have the Swiss, the Belgians and the people who live in Oregon. In the Netherlands, the only country where both voluntary active euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide are practiced and studied, only approximately two per cent of all deaths result from euthanasia and 0.7-0.8 per cent from doctor-assisted suicide, while