STEPHEN LEWIS meets a woman who believes in the right to be able to die with dignity

FOR most people, it's probably hard to imagine what life must be like for Diane Pretty, the 43-year-old with advanced motor neurone disease who last week had her plea for her husband to be allowed to help her die rejected by the European court of human rights.

Joyce Pickard believes she understands.

"She knows that her sort of illness can end with heart failure, lung failure or choking to death and she and her husband must be full of fear," she says. "They know the end is going to come and they would much have preferred to have a neat ending, in peace together, when they were able to talk to each other and were not in a panic."

Mrs Pickard, one of the founder members of the North Yorkshire group of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, says she knew a woman in York 15 years or so ago who was in a similar situation to Mrs Pretty.

She was lucky, however - because she had an understanding GP. After talking through her wishes with the woman herself, her husband and her consultant, Mrs Pickard says, the doctor visited the patient in her own home, where he administered an injection "which could be said to be for relief of suffering but in fact caused her life to end."

Strictly speaking, it was illegal. "But that doctor was a deeply moral, caring and courageous man," Mrs Pickard insists. "He didn't like to do what he did, but he knew it was the right thing to do."

In many ways, death is one of the last great taboos. It is an issue many of us shy away from. But in fact, Mrs Pickard points out, death is an inevitable part of life; and rational individuals should have the right to decide when to end it. "We have a considerable degree of choice now in all areas of life. I think in the way we have said about contraception and abortion that a woman's body is her own, so we can say about the later stages of life, isn't my body my own? "

But isn't life supposed to be sacred? Even as a Quaker, the retired former head teacher of York's Mount School, now 80, doesn't have much time for that argument. "We are only killing the body, not the spirit! And it is rather hypocritical to say that the life of an elderly suffering person is considered sacred when we send young men to work to kill other young, healthy people. What do we mean then when we say life is sacred? We cannot have it both ways."

She herself hopes that when the time comes for her to die, she will be able to do so with peace and dignity. She acknowledges doctors are right to make every effort to save life, while there is hope of recovery. But she doesn't accept people should be forced to live out lives that have become a burden simply because the law would punish those who sought to help them end it.

"If I'm knocked down by a car, I fall under a bus, if I have a sudden stroke or coronary, I don't want to be a bed-blocker when there is no purpose at all and no chance of ever returning to live a useful and sensible life," she says.

To make her wishes clear, she has signed an Advance Directive or 'living will' which sets out what treatment she would or would not want if she became too seriously ill in future to explain her wishes to a doctor herself.

It amounts to asking a doctor to withold medical treatment in certain conditions, so life is allowed to end as naturally and peacefully as possible - just as happened recently in the case of Miss B, the paralysed woman kept alive by life support, after she won a High Court ruling that she had the right to tell doctors to turn her ventilator off.

Signing a 'living will' makes it clear to doctors what your wishes are, and removes from them some of the terrible burden of deciding whether to 'pull the plug' in the case of a terminally or permanently ill patient artificially kept alive.

It would not have helped Diane Pretty, however.

She did not simply want a doctor to 'switch off' treatment, but was asking for her husband to be allowed to deliberately and actively intervene to end her life.

And until and unless the law is changed, that's an entirely different thing.

- The North Yorkshire branch of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society exists to provide support, advice and information. To find out more, call Joyce Pickard on 01904 621179.

Updated: 11:06 Wednesday, May 08, 2002