FORTY terminally ill patients have appealed to the British Medical Association not to change its stance on mercy killing as doctors prepare for a key vote on the issue at the BMA’s annual meeting.

Last year, in a surprise move, the BMA abandoned its long-held opposition to euthanasia, moving to a neutral position. This meant that it could not campaign either for or against a change in the law.

Today the issue will be debated again. More than 20 motions have been put forward that will give the association the chance to revert to its previous position, or to call for a ballot of doctors. Those on both sides have been lobbying hard in the fringes of the association’s meeting in Belfast.

A letter published in The Times today, representing the views of 40 patients, says that in all the debates about giving people the right to die, the voice of the terminally ill is seldom heard. “Let us make it clear the majority of us want this choice,” the letter says.

“Palliative care can do many wonderful things to relieve symptoms but it cannot cure a loss of dignity or the inability to do the things that make life enjoyable. Anyone suggesting this is the answer to this problem is fooling themselves.

“Keeping the status quo means that a considerable number of patients, many of us among them, will be forced to suffer unbearably. The cost of doing nothing is terrible suffering. Yet the arguments against doing something are based on unfounded fears. If safeguards can be produced for other aspects of medical practice, such as withholding and withdrawal of treatment, then surely they can be produced for this.”

Since the BMA vote last year, other authoritative medical bodies have come out against any change in the law, and the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, which was introduced into the House of Lords by Lord Joffe, was defeated by 148 to 100 votes. A poll of palliative care surgeons, organised as part of a ballot by the Royal College of Physicians, found that 95 per cent were opposed to any change.

Care Not Killing, an alliance of medical, religious and disablement organisations, led opposition to the Joffe Bill. Yesterday Dr Peter Saunders, its campaign director, said: “The BMA is increasingly isolated in the medical community, not only in the UK but internationally. We have just heard that the World Medical Association — made up of 80 national medical groups — is opposed.”

Dr Saunders said that he had “misgivings” about the process by which the BMA voted last year, on the final day of the conference in a barely-quorate meeting that changed policy by a margin of 93 to 82.

Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society) said that doctors were divided and a neutral stance was the right one for the BMA. Deborah Annetts, the chief executive, said that a survey of 200 GPs for the organisation by GFK Healthcare showed that 30 per cent of GPs would be willing, if the law permitted, to write a prescription to assist a patient to die, if their suffering could not be relieved by palliative care.

Placed in a terminally ill patient’s position and recognising that palliative care cannot prevent all suffering, 43 per cent of GPs would want the option of being able to ask a doctor for a prescription, and 60 per cent supported the BMA’s current position.

Ms Annetts said: “The GFK survey shows doctors remain divided in their views and strongly support the BMA’s neutral position. Only a position of neutrality coherently reflects the split views within the profession.”

Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics for the BMA, said that its position had been reached in a debate that had been carried out entirely properly. “Care Not Killing didn’t like the result,” she said.

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