Dr. Richard Lamerton, Medical Director, Hospice of the Valleys, South Wales

If you give someone rights, it means someone else has a duty. A right to die means someone has a duty to kill. If doctors do this:

1. As in Holland, doctors would lose their patients' trust.
2. As the habit of killing catches on, the voluntary element is lost. Patients in Holland are having to carry cards saying "Please, doctor, DON'T kill me.."
3. The ways open to doctors for killing are not always effective. To be paralysed but still conscious, or not to die as expected, are distinct risks - all drugs sometimes fail.

When the question was being debated in the House of Lords a doctor, knowing these limitations, asked a Dutch doctor giving evidence "What you do when the patient doesn't die first time?" The gruesome details in the reply were a major factor in deciding the committee against euthanasia. Don't be dazzled by the words "death with dignity".

What would be much kinder, quicker and surer would be a bullet in the head. Doctors should be left out of this altogether. Policemen could do the killings, or undertakers, or social workers.

I have considerable sympathy for Mrs. Pretty - Motor Neurone Disease is awful. But having looked after dozens of people with the condition, I would hate to endorse Mrs. Pretty's message of despair. Some patients despair, but most do not. Most find new depths in relationships, new meanings in life, and enough reasons to go on living. But they do need skilled care - I hope Mrs. Pretty is getting help from a good Hospice with experience in this kind of care.

But if we make it legal to kill her, some very dangerous consequences would follow.

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