Numbers choosing assisted death were not rising; palliative care improved as death became an open, transparent business.
His sights are set on the Oregon model in the US, where one in every 700 terminally ill patients chooses assisted dying over care.
When something called Project Hague crashed at the polls in 2001, the party's bizarre electoral system chose assisted suicide with Iain Duncan Smith, who lasted less than a year.
Using a more conservative estimate of just 0.2% each year, and the latest available statistics from the states currently allowing assisted suicide, that would have been between 1,153 and 1,326 people choosing assisted suicide in England and Wales.
Her action is being supported by Dignity in Dying, which campaigns for a law change to allow terminally ill and mentally competent patients to choose assisted death in the UK.
However, I want the ability to write a medical directive for euthanasia if I cannot recognize family and friends, or to choose assisted suicide if my quality of life is intolerably poor.
It should hardly be necessary to make the point that my decision to choose assisted dying, to avoid a few more weeks of suffering, does not put into question the value of my life as a whole, nor the value of the life of others in particular, or humanity itself.
If the same proportion of them choose assisted dying as have recently done so in Oregon, there could be several thousand cases a year before high court judges; several thousand extra interviews on a literal matter of life and death, each to be conducted by two psychiatrists at a time when NHS appointments are supposed to last 10 minutes.
Being that very small numbers choose assisted suicide, we can afford to take extraordinary safeguards.
A recent Ipsos Reid poll commissioned by Dying With Dignity Canada found that 88percentt of Canadians were in favour of patients having the right to choose assisted dying if they have a terminal illness "causing unbearable suffering".
