Right-to-die campaigner dies after five-week fast

Jean Davies, 86, died on 1 October, five weeks after she stopped eating and two weeks after she decided to stop drinking water.

Her 60-year-old daughter Bronwen Davies, from Cardiff, told Channel 4 News: “I always said to her …. I respect the rights of other people to make their own choices about their own lives and their own deaths.

“However uncomfortable it is for me is really not the point. I wouldn’t want someone else telling me how to live my life and to make choices for me and I accord that respect to other people.”

Four weeks into her fast, Jean Davies told the Sunday Times that she did not want anyone else involved in helping her die as assisted suicide is illegal in the UK. She said that she had seen a friend take a drug overdose that did not work, and feared the same might happen to her.

“It is hell. I can’t tell you how hard it is,” the 86-year-old said. “You wouldn’t decide this unless you thought your life was going to be so bad. It is intolerable.”

Jean Davies was not suffering from a terminal illness, but did suffer from a range of medical conditions. She spent many years of her life campaigning for a change in the law on assisted suicide and published a book, Choice in Dying, in 1997.

Davies was president of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies from 1990 to 1992 and was also chair of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society UK (now Dignity in Dying).