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Heart and Soul

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Personal approaches to spirituality from around the world.

Heart and Soul: Choosing Life: Episode 2

Episode 2

Choosing Life

BBC World Service - Heart and Soul, Choosing Life, Episode 2

Mark Dowd speaks to Edward Turner, who witnessed the peaceful assisted death of his mother

Mark Dowd speaks to Edward Turner, who witnessed the peaceful assisted death of his mother at a Dignitas clinic in Zurich in 2006.

In the UK, the campaign to legalise assisted dying so that an adult with a terminal illness could be helped to take their own life, is gathering momentum. 

Novelist Sir Terry Pratchett has run a high-profile campaign for a change to the law since he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2007, and several British television programmes have accompanied people seeking an assisted death to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.  

In the country that pioneered holistic end-of-life care through the hospice movement, why have people lost their faith in the possibility of dying well without intervention?   

In part two Mark Dowd speaks to Edward Turner, who witnessed the peaceful assisted death of his mother at a Dignitas clinic in Zurich in 2006, which he says could not have been more of a contrast with the more harrowing, but more "normal", death of his father in a nursing home four years earlier.

And Mark hears from doctors and terminally ill patients in South Africa and Kenya, where assisted dying is not an option and palliative care is more difficult to access. 

What do they make of the UK debate?

Heart and Soul: Choosing Life

BBC World Service

Mark Dowd reflects on two personal stories that surround the debate on assisted suicide.

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