Bishop of Worcester urges MPs to vote against assisted dying plans after wife's cancer death

The Assisted Dying Bill will be debated in the House of Commons this afternoon. It would allow patients to end their lives if they have no more than six months to live.

As well as having to demonstrate a “clear and settled intention”, two doctors would need to sign off their request.

Like many churchmen, John Inge, the Bishop of Worcester, opposes the legalisation of assisted dying. But he says his perspective has not only been shaped by his faith, but by his wife.

On Easter Day last year, Denise Inge died from abdominal sarcoma at the age of 51.

Almost a year earlier, she was given a bleak prognosis - and offered chemotherapy which had, she was told, a one-in-four chance of having any benefit.

But he describes the months that followed as being filled with “many delicious moments” because she chose to live. Had the option of an assisted death been available to her in Britain, he suspects her fear of being “a burden” to her loved ones might have prompted her to end her life.

Inevitably she would feel pressurised in that way, it seems to me, and it really brought it home to me in a personal manner.

This is the law that Bob Cole wanted - the 68 year old who went to Dignitas last month, accompanied by ITV News. Our correspondent Rohit Kachroo travelled with him to Switzerland where he took his own life, a year after his wife Ann did precisely the same thing at the same clinic.

During his final days, he argued that current laws ensure a “dying household pet would be shown more compassion” than he was.