Determining one’s own death

Abstract

Two people have recently brought the concept of the ‘right to die’ into the public arena. The two situations could not have been more different. ‘Miss B’, a 43- year old woman paralysed from the neck down for more than a year, asked that her life-support system should be switched off. Diane Pretty suffered from motor neurone disease and requested that her husband should help her to die without risk of prosecution when the disease became unbearable.