Assisted dying bill is welcome and overdue, but it's only a modest first step - David Behrens

Their generation was my generation. And that’s what I hope, too.

You can’t put a number on oldness. For me, I will know it has come when I can no longer look after myself. I don’t want the burden to fall on someone else, even though they may not see it as such.

But how can we ensure that our wishes, whatever they may be, are fulfilled? We can plan ahead for old age but death remains the one depressing inevitability over which we are denied control.

That, at least, has been the case thus far. But this week the West Yorkshire MP Kim Leadbeater hastened a Damascene moment: a chance for parliament to bring us into line with half a dozen other European countries as well as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and several US states in making assisted dying allowable in law.

Informal polling suggests that a majority of MPs are now in favour of such reform, reflecting a much bigger shift in public opinion. But though legislators may be pushing at an open door, the question is whether they are pushing far enough. For although Ms Leadbeater’s Private Members’ Bill is welcome and overdue, it is but a modest first step.

Many of us have witnessed loved ones dying in the most painful circumstances and wondered whether we could have done more to ease their pain and their passage, either as individuals or as a society.

My own memory goes back 30 years to when my dad suffered a catastrophic stroke. He was 68 and though he lived for four more years he could neither speak nor walk. He had been a gentlemen’s outfitter but now he could not even dress himself. He was alive but he wasn’t living.

Looking after him nearly wore out my mum, too. When the end finally came, he had long since given up. Not even the news of a new grandson made him want to hang on.

Yet he would have fallen outside the scope of the proposed law, for his condition was not medically terminal. The stroke rendered his life too miserable to endure but it did not kill him. And 72 is too young to be considered old. But what was to be gained – for him, for those around him or for the State – by prolonging his misery? Where was the line to be drawn and by whom?

It was a point to which the Archbishop of Canterbury alluded on the eve of the Bill’s introduction to the Commons. Justin Welby mounted what seemed to me a confused opposition to reform, arguing it would lead to a “slippery slope” on which those who were not terminally ill might feel pressured to have their lives ended medically.

“I’ve sat with people at their bedside,” said Welby, “and people have said, ‘I want my mum, I want my daughter, I want my brother to go because this is so horrible’.” It was not fair, he thought, that they be made to feel guilty for harbouring such thoughts.

But there is a fine line between guilt and compassion. Most families in those circumstances act out of concern and kindness for each other. If guilt enters the equation it is only because the Church has implanted it. And guilt for what, exactly?

The counter argument was articulated by Sir Nicholas Mostyn, a retired judge the same age as me, who has the degenerative – but not terminal – condition Parkinson’s disease and will fall outside the legislation proposed by Ms Leadbeater. He would like to see the law relaxed to the point where he and 150,000 fellow sufferers were no longer compelled to watch helplessly as their faculties deserted them.

There is already a precedent for this, in a country far more God-fearing than ours. Spain, where nearly a quarter of the population considers itself “highly religious”, has legalised assisted dying for those with incurable conditions, not just terminal diagnoses. Parkinson’s is one of the most common.

Anti-reform campaigners worry that such a law would pressure vulnerable patients to end their lives to spare their families the financial grief of ongoing care. A fair point, but in death we are all vulnerable. The power of choice may be all we have left.

That’s why I see Kim Leadbeater’s crusade not as a slippery slope but, in the words of Paul McCartney, the start of a long and winding road to Damascus.