IT IS very hard to tackle an issue rationally when people’s mothers are involved. Yesterday on the Today programme, the key 8.10am slot was taken up with an argument about so-called living wills. On one side, an MP whose mother had indicated with her eyes, although in an otherwise vegetative state, that contrary to her previously expressed wishes, she wanted to live, and did so — happily, according to the MP — for another five years. On the other, a newspaper columnist whose mother had died a slow and painful death because doctors were not allowed to help her to die.

I approach this subject with extreme trepidation, but the fact is that Claire Curtis-Thomas, MP, has chosen to make her mother a part of the argument, and now she cannot be the only person entitled to discuss it. I find her account of what happened rather alarming. She devised a card system so that her mother, by looking at the correct letters, could spell out what she wanted to say. This obviously puts some power in the hands of the person who selects the cards for the person to choose from.

She then told her mother, just before she had to decide whether to live (by having a tube inserted in her stomach in order to feed her): “When you make the decision I want you to bear in mind that you are my mother, you’re the only one I’ve got . . . We don’t care what state you’re in. All that matters to us is that we’ve got you.

“And, while we’ve got you, we’ve got a mother and a grandmother. Without you, we haven’t got those things.”

Mrs Curtis-Thomas, a devout Roman Catholic, then went to church and prayed. When she came back the next day her mother spelt out that she wanted to live. She spent five years in a specialist home for people with profound disabilities, only ever regaining the mobility in her thumb and finger and never able to speak. She was, however, Mrs Curtis-Thomas says, “bright as a button right up until her death”, enjoying conversations and her grandchildren whom she otherwise would not have known. “They were some of the best years of her life.”

With apologies, and obviously without first-hand knowledge of the case, I’m afraid I find that extremely questionable. And questioning these assertions is important, because they are the most public, and emotive, argument being used against the introduction of living wills, let alone euthanasia or assisted suicide. Where judgment may be clouded by personal emotion, then bad — even cruel — law might be made.

These issues — effectively, whether somebody’s life is “worth living” or not — are often better made by somebody objective, which is why the courts are prepared to overrule the wishes of relatives with regard to the sustaining of a person’s life beyond its natural end and any hope of recovery. The parents of the one-year-old girl in hospital in Portsmouth, whose doctors had to go to court to get permission to let her die when her condition next becomes critical, seem to me, for instance, to be misguided, and the result cruel beyond belief. Doctors have said that Charlotte Wyatt is in constant, intolerable pain, enduring a quality of life that is both “terrible and permanent”, with severe heart, lung, kidney and brain problems. Yet her parents now want them to stop administering morphine to try to control the pain, because they fear that it might hasten her death. No, I have never had to confront that terrible choice myself. But I am as certain as I can be about what I would decide if I did.

If there is a flaw in the Bill passed yesterday, it is not that it officially sanctions living wills, enabling people to make their own decisions, in advance, about what level of treatment they are prepared to accept. It is that it does not go far enough, and allow people to request that doctors facilitate their death when the pain becomes unbearable or the quality of life miserable. The halfway house of existing law is a cruel and cowardly compromise, allowing nutrition and hydration to be withdrawn, thereby starving a patient to a slow and painful death, but not allowing anyone to kill him.

Religious groups go on about the sanctity of life, but there is a sanctity in death as well. The flipside of our ability to prolong life way beyond its natural end must be the willingness to end that life when it is no longer bearable or worth having. Many of the people to whom the new law applies would not be alive “naturally”. They are kept alive by artificial means of one type or another, and may already have been resuscitated. The ultimate arrogance is to refuse a person the choice to die.

Doctors have traditionally made that choice for sick people, within strict guidelines — for instance by increasing the amount of painkilling drugs given. But the Harold Shipman case, together with the increasing readiness of patients or their relatives to drag medical opinion to the High Court and beyond, has meant that doctors’ leaders now welcome any attempt to clarify the law.

We should be grateful to doctors for their willingness to take on such burdens — hardly the glamorous end of medicine — and beg them to continue to do so. For it has to be doctors who assist a suicide, not friends or relatives, not only to protect the vulnerable from greedy relatives, but to protect relatives from the unreasonable demands of a dying person who is possibly in great pain. To kill someone you love is a horribly difficult thing to do. One Home Office study found that 30 per cent of mercy killers end up killing themselves, haunted by what they have done. Better by far to ask the doctors to take on the responsibility, if they will.

But our increasing unwillingness to trust doctors, and a tendency to head to the courts to challenge them, have made the old system unworkable. The living will is an attempt to formalise it. It enshrines in law the cruel halfway house. Be very, very careful to whom you give that power of attorney. Not so much because, as Iain Duncan Smith and other opponents fear, they might allow you to be killed — but because they might not.

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