'I watched my father go through torture as the kind, gentle man I knew was destroyed'

Later this month, MPs will have their say on a proposed law to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales.

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is expected to be debated and voted on on November 29, the first Commons vote on assisted dying since 2015.

Only terminally ill adults with less than six months to live who have a settled wish to end their lives would be eligible under the proposed law. Ms Leadbeater has warned the existing policy leads to people with a settled wish to die having to travel abroad to end their lives.

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But opposition campaigners have raised fears of coercion and a slippery slope to wider legislation taking in more people wishing to end their lives. Strict safeguarding measures as part of the bill are expected to include the patient needing to have mental capacity to decide and for two doctors and a judge to sign off each case.

We wanted to hear from prominent campaigners from both sides of the debate. So we spoke to one leading figure who is supportive of the bill, and another who is against it. This week, the Manchester Evening News asked Alex Pandolfo, a Manchester-born assisted dying campaigner, and The Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Rev Dr David Walker, to share their views on the bill. Here is what they had to say.

Alex Pandolfo

I have long supported assisted dying, having seen and heard about others who suffered for many years with non-treatable or curable conditions.

Years before my own diagnosis, I watched my father go through five years of torture as the kind, gentle man I knew was destroyed by dementia. As his condition worsened, I gave up work as an academic to care for him until his death in 2003.

In March 2015, I was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, the most common type of dementia which remains incurable and life-limiting. The doctor's prognosis that I had three to five years to live was even worse than the diagnosis.

After that, my life became totally consumed with fear and dread of what was to come. Two weeks after my diagnosis, I applied for an 'assisted voluntary death' at Lifecircle in Switzerland.

I've always been quite pragmatic and analytical so I had weighed up the pros and cons. If that plan failed, I was going to take my own life. They were the two alternatives facing me, although I was not suicidal and I did not want to die.

In June 2015, I got the green light for an assisted death. I'm not a religious person but it was like being reborn.

I knew I had this insurance policy so when things started to deteriorate I could go over there and have a humane death. It has saved my life, improved the quality of my life and prolonged it because I'm still here almost 10 years on.

I don't think about dying anymore, I enjoy life. I still belong to the Lifecircle programme and pay a yearly membership fee.

Assisted death is all about choice. The majority of people who apply for assisted death don't use it, they die of natural causes. They just have it as a safeguard.

The bill as it stands is a wonderful thing and I hope it goes through for the minority of people it will help. It's a good thing for people who are going to have to suffer for the last six months of their life, but the majority of people who travel from the UK to Switzerland for an assisted death each year would not qualify. People like myself would not qualify for it.

The basic concept of assisted dying is a choice, a choice to end suffering. I would like to see that include a wider range of people. This is developing inclusive policy, not a slippery slope, which would mean compulsion.

That is something that has not happened anywhere in the world and something I would be fundamentally opposed to. The assisted dying bill has limitations but I would be extremely happy for it to go through for those who will benefit from it.

The Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Rev Dr David Walker

We prize individual freedom highly in our society, and rightly so. We don’t expect to be told not to do something unless it is clear how it will cause significant harm.

Caring for a loved one in their final months, weeks and days alters us and can lead us to question if there is another way. Yet what we have seen, as the current Bill begins to come under scrutiny in Parliament, and as its advocates are subjected to questions in the media, is that the harms are real and the safeguards intended to prevent them are not up to the job.

My concerns echo those of many of the organisations that support people living with disabilities, along with many doctors and health professionals. They are supported by my Christian faith, which upholds that every human life is precious, but I share them with those of other faiths and none.

My first problem with the Bill is that it has no workable means of ensuring that an apparent decision to seek an assisted death is free of coercion. A sick and frail person is deeply vulnerable.

When the time involved in caring for them is impacting the lives of their loved ones, or the costs of providing caring are eating into life savings intended for future generations, whether pressure comes from without or within, it is still coercive.

When repeatedly challenged in a major media interview this week, one of the Bill’s key sponsors was totally unable to offer an answer to how medical staff could ensure a decision was not being made under pressure. If even a tiny proportion of those whose lives were ended had been coerced, the Bill is fatally flawed.

Secondly, evidence from the small number of states and countries that have passed some similar form of legislation overwhelmingly demonstrates that whatever limitations on eligibility are set, it only takes a few years for the law to be amended to allow a far wider category of deaths to be authorised, or for loopholes to be found, and left unplugged, with the same result. Nowhere have checks and balances, however carefully legislated, survived contact with the real world.

Third, I give weight to the fact that many people living fulfilled lives despite disabilities, see the Bill as deeply threatening. Crucially, it breaks the principle that all human lives are of huge (most would say equal) value. Once that dam is breached it is only a short step towards saying that some human lives are more costly than they are worth, and reducing funding for care packages accordingly.

None of us want to see loved ones, or anyone, suffering in prolonged agony with a desperately degraded and undignified quality of life. Yet if that is the question, which many proponents of the Bill suggest, then surely, as the Secretary of State for Health has said, the answer is better provision of care, in our hospitals, hospices and homes. It’s not leaving them to suffer so much that they plead to be helped to die.