I have been preoccupied for nearly a decade by the need for a change in the law to legalize the choice of physician-assisted dying for mentally competent people with terminal illness who have expressed a settled wish to die. In summer 2011, I was elected chair of a new group – Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD) – whose immediate aim is to represent the views of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals who favour a change in the law. I took over this role from Dr Ann McPherson.

I was privileged to know Ann, sadly only for a short time, before she died in June 2011. By a bitter irony she had a hideous death, which her daughter – a consultant dermatologist – described in harrowing detail in a “Personal View” in the British Medical Journal (2012). Despite her unbearable symptoms, which had resisted the best possible palliative care, any physician assisting her to die (by, for example, writing a prescription for life-ending medication) would have been prosecuted for manslaughter, and been liable to a fourteen-year gaol sentence.

That anyone could oppose such a humane ambition as decriminalization of assisted dying may seem astonishing. But there has been highly organized opposition to a change in the law. Some opponents have appealed to religious principles such as “the sanctity of life”, but more often than not wrap up their opposition in a cloak of pragmatic concerns intended to instil fear.