Sir Terry Pratchett Calls For Reasoned Choice

Author Sir Terry Pratchett calls for reasoned choice, Feb. 1, 2010.

The author Sir Terry Pratchett is calling for euthanasia tribunals to give sufferers from incurable diseases the right to medical help to end their lives.

Pratchett will insist in his Dimbleby lecture, to be broadcast tonight, that "the time is really coming" for legalising assisted death.

Two polls published today back his views. Of more than 1,000 people interviewed for a BBC Panorama programme, 73% believed friends or relatives should be able to assist the suicide of a terminally ill loved one. A YouGov poll of 2,053 people for the Telegraph produced even stronger support, with 80% saying that relatives should not be prosecuted, and 75% backing a change in the law.

Pratchett, author of the bestselling Discworld fantasy novels, was diagnosed two years ago with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's disease – a discovery he memorably described, when he broke the news on the Discworld News website, as "an embuggerance".

In his lecture, Shaking Hands With Death, the author will volunteer to be a test case before a euthanasia tribunal himself.

The tribunal panels would include a legal expert in family matters and a doctor with experience of serious long-term illness.

"If granny walks up to the tribunal and bangs her walking stick on the table and says 'Look, I've really had enough, I hate this bloody disease, and I'd like to die thank you very much young man', I don't see why anyone should stand in her way."

He said there was no evidence from countries where assisted dying is allowed of granny being coerced into dying so relatives could get their hands on her money.

"Choice is very important in this matter. But there will be some probably older, probably wiser GPs, who will understand. The tribunal would be acting for the good of society as well as that of the applicant – and ensure they are of sound and informed mind, firm in their purpose, suffering from a life-threatening and incurable disease and not under the influence of a third party.

"If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice."

His lecture comes a week after Kay Gilderdale was cleared of attempted murder for helping her 31-year-old daughter, Lynn, to commit suicide following years of suffering from the chronic fatigue syndrome ME.

However, days earlier Frances Inglis, who killed her 22-year-old son by heroin injection believing he was left in a "living hell" after severe brain damage in a road accident, was found guilty of murder and sentenced by majority verdict to a minimum of nine years in jail.

Pratchett is the first novelist invited to deliver the annual BBC lecture, the 34th in honour of the veteran broadcaster Richard Dimbleby.

He has already criticised the existing law and the risk faced by any relatives who help a family member to die of being charged with murder.

Of his own Alzheimer's, he said: "It is not nice and I do not wish to be there for the endgame." He is a patron of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, and has donated £500,000 of his own money for research.

"I don't think people are particularly bothered about death, it's the life before death that worries us," he said in a recent BBC television interview.

By Maev Kennedy, The Guardian