I’m just saying that we are living in a liberal society where each person has freedom of choice. If I’m unconscious and unable to help myself, I would not want any doctor who helps me to be charged with murder or manslaughter. I'd want my medical attendants protected from what you might call interference in the private and confidential doctor-patient relationship.

What is interesting is that in the sixties and seventies, euthanasia was carried out quite regularly for spina bifida in new born babies. You can treat spina bifida. But often all you’re doing is postponing their moment of death in the sense that you might do lots of repeated operations and instead of dying in the first few weeks, they would die when they were seven or eight and they had personalities of their own.

Professor John Lorber, Professor of Paediatric Pathology at Sheffield, was well known for this. He had what he called sub-caloric feeding – this was in fact an euphemism for euthanasia. It was another way of saying: we starve the baby.

What happens now, with antenatal screening, with ultra sound, is that a bad case of spina bifida is identified early and the parents are offered abortion. It’s up to the mother.

And that creates another medical dilemma. You see, modern medicine while it solves one kind of problem, it often creates another. A mother who’s expecting a happy event, on the basis of an ultrasound scan is faced with a baby that’s very deformed and which may not live very long. She and her partner have to decide whether to have an abortion.

I’m personally against abortion. This may seem paradoxical, but you can’t ask an unborn baby. At least I can make a decision as an adult who is fit and well that if certain things happen to me I don’t want to be treated.

Q: What about people who are depressed?

Oh no. My view is that the choice must be made when you are perfectly fit and healthy. One reason why I joined the euthanasia movement after I retired was that I said this is what I want done to me. I made a choice, a living will.

If something happens to me and when they treat me they find at the end that I’m not as I want to be, that is I’m not independent, I’m incontinent, unable to look after myself, I’d like them to quietly . . . shall we say, see that I don’t know what’s going on.