A terminally ill woman has begun a landmark legal battle to win the right to die so that she can bring to an end her acute suffering caused by a rare heart condition.

Kelly Taylor, 30, wants her doctors to increase her morphine dose to induce a coma-like state and then obey her wish not to be kept alive artificially.

Mrs Taylor won the right to a hearing at the High Court in London next month. The action could affect thousands of people who are suffering from terminal illnesses.

Her lawyers, using the European Convention on Human Rights, will combine her legal rights to have adequate pain control with her right to have a “living will” that will state her desire not to be resuscitated or fed food or liquids artificially.

The medical team for Mrs Taylor, the General Medical Council and antieuthanasia campaigners believe that such treatment amounts to euthanasia and is illegal.

Mr Justice Kirkwood said yesterday that he would alert the Attorney-General to the case because a potential ruling under civil law could affect criminal law.

Mrs Taylor was born with a hole in the heart and suffers from Eisenmenger’s syndrome, a painful and debilitating condition that causes breathlessness, palpitations and fainting as well as increasing the risk of a stroke and kidney problems. She is severely disabled and has a spinal condition called Klippel-Feil syndrome.

She is too frail to undergo a heart and lung transplant, and is allergic to many of the medicines that are used to treat her conditions. She has been told that she has less than a year to live.

Her lawyers will claim that the United Bristol Healthcare NHS Trust, St Peter’s Hospice in the city and Mrs Taylor’s doctor have a duty to treat her pain even if it results in her death.

Last year she attempted to starve herself to death as an act of voluntary euthanasia. But after 19 days without food she was in such severe pain that she started eating again.

Mrs Taylor, from Bristol, was too unwell to attend the hearing but said afterwards: “I have made the decision because enough is enough. I don’t want to suffer any more.

“I’m not depressed and I’ve never been depressed. I am a happy person. But my illness is now at the point where I don’t want to deal with it any more. In the next year I will deteriorate and that deterioration will become quite undignified. I want to avoid that.

“I hope the court will come to the conclusion that the decision by my GP and hospice was unlawful and that I can be sedated to the point that I become unconscious. And secondary to that, that my living will should then come into effect so that I can die.” She had considered travelling to Switzerland to commit assisted suicide but feared that her husband, Richard, with whom she recently celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary, could be arrested upon his return.

“I got to the stage of trying to find out about tickets and so on, but then I became too ill to travel by aeroplane. I had also watched other people fly over there and saw what happened to their loved ones when they returned. I didn’t want Richard to be investigated,” she said.

“I don’t want to die in a foreign country, I want to die at home. While I have respect for people who go over there [Switzerland], it really shouldn’t be necessary. We should have a law over here.”

Despite her pain and being confined often to her bed, she has studied for seven A levels because she was “terrified of boredom”. She is currently studying for an A level in English literature.

Deborah Annetts, chief executive of the pressure group Dignity in Dying, said that Mrs Taylor was in an “intolerable position”. “Her case highlights the impossible dilemma that the current law presents to patients with terminal illness, where pain and palliative care do not work to relieve their condition,” she said.

Richard Stein, the solicitor for Mrs Taylor, said: “We have advised our client that she is entitled to seek this treatment and that it is unlawful for doctors to deny it to her unless they also take steps to find a doctor willing to provide it.”

A British Medical Association spokesman said: “While we sympathise with Ms Taylor’s situation, we cannot support her request for doctors to sedate her to a state of unconsciousness with the specific intention of ending her life.”

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