Mercy killing has been widely practised for years, so we should make it legal

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Diane Pretty loses case, while Miss B 'dies with dignity'

Diane Pretty's message was clear: 'The law has taken all my rights away'

Miss B's dogged legal fight to find a peaceful end

If Diane Pretty has the courage to die, then we should allow her to do so and permit her husband to act on her wishes and help her to end her life with dignity. That the European Court of Human Rights has decided to endorse the British courts' refusal to sanction such a course of action is obviously a great disappointment to Mrs Pretty, who will now face a painful and distressing death from motor neurone disease – a death that she passionately does not want.

The remedy lies in a change in the law. The 1961 Suicide Act was framed at a time when cases like Mrs Pretty's were much rarer. Because of rising life expectancies and developments in medical technology, we are living longer and thus contracting more terminal diseases. At the same time, medical science has developed increasingly sophisticated ways of dealing with diseases such as cancer, the hospice movement has transformed the quality of palliative care and the National Health Service has provided the financial underpinning for many of these developments.

The result of these trends is that medical professionals have had to develop an informal, unregulated and inconsistent code that has, in effect, governed the practice of euthanasia for decades. While Mrs Pretty has been fighting her case through every court in the land, many others suffering in comparable circumstances have had their lives ended without fuss. Indeed, the Court's ruling came on the very day that it was announced that "Miss B" had died after winning the right to end her life. The High Court ruled last month that "Miss B", who could not be named for legal reasons, had the mental capacity to ask for her life-support equipment to be switched off.

Well away from the media spotlight, the administration of a high dose of painkillers, for example, is common and, although such incidents rarely result in much public debate about human rights, to all intents and purposes they constitute euthanasia.

Whatever view is taken about the merits of voluntary euthanasia, it is clear that the present law is inadequate. Doctors have sometimes been placed in an intolerable position, with only their consciences to guide them through the moral calculus each case presents. When cases of doctors who have clearly – and with the consent of all concerned – assisted the death of a patient appear before the courts, juries quite often refuse to convict them.

And there is the straightforward moral principle that we should be allowed to live our lives as we would wish, as long as we have control of our faculties and do no harm to others. That should include the right to end our lives as we want, and the absurdity of a law against suicide has always been apparent, most of those who might be prosecuted clearly having put themselves far beyond the reach of any temporal judicial authority.

All this points to the need for a new law to regulate euthanasia and lay down safeguards. In the Netherlands, for example, the law allows for euthanasia provided that the decision has been approved by two doctors and an independent panel. That would certainly stop any doctor who fancies himself as a would-be Dr Harold Shipman (whose crimes were, in any event, extremely rare).

Parliament might wish to see tighter or looser rules than that, but some form of coherent framework has to be constructed so that patients, their relatives and those providing care for them can act according to a patient's own freely expressed wishes.

A change in the law is inevitable; it is a pity that it will probably not come in time for Mrs Pretty to die, as she so passionately wants to, with dignity.