Assisted suicide campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen today received a rebuke from the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales for suggesting that he had no right to publicly oppose a change in the law.
Dame Esther, a former television presenter who is suffering from terminal lung cancer, extracted a promise from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer for parliamentary time to be given to a Bill to allow medics to help patients to kill themselves.
The 84-year-old objected bitterly when Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster and president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, soon afterwards issued a pastoral letter urging the faithful to write to their MPs and ask them to vote againstthe Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill at Second Reading on November 29.
