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LONDON, May 17, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The widow of a disabled man is backing the attempt by another paralyzed man to overturn the law against direct euthanasia.

Jane Nicklinson, the widow of Tony Nicklinson, and Paul Lamb, a 57-year-old man who is almost entirely paralyzed, are petitioning the courts to allow doctors to kill patients by lethal injection.

Lamb was in court earlier this week, asking through his lawyers for the law to be overturned, because his life had become “overly burdensome and futile, with an extreme degree of pain, discomfort, and indignity.”

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Lord Judge of the Court of Appeal said, “We are acutely aware of the desperate situation in which the appellants find themselves, and we are very sympathetic.” But he added, “We cannot decide this case as a matter of personal sympathy” but had to rule on the “basis of principles of law.”

Lamb, who was nearly totally paralyzed in a car accident in 1990, says his life now consists of being “fed and watered,” and wants to die.

He said in a prepared statement, “I have lived with these conditions for a lot of years and have given it my best shot. Now I feel worn out and I am genuinely fed up with my life. I feel I cannot and do not want to keep living.”

“I am fed up of going through the motions of life rather than living it,” he said. “I feel enough is enough.”

Paul Tully, general secretary of SPUC Pro-Life responded to the case, saying, the “legal attack” on the right to life by Lamb and his fellow complainants “means that disabled people and elderly people are in the firing-line from several directions at once.”

He warned that the effort to install legalized euthanasia will put even more pressure on the financial resources for disabled people for their health and social care.

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“We are also seeing disturbing abuses of palliative care, through incentivized pathways for example, which are being used to hasten or bring about death in many cases,” Tully said. “The pressure is on health trusts to put budgets before good care. This situation is being exploited by those who think that people with limited lives or serious disabilities should be helped to die.”

The Lamb case is being followed by Charles Lord Falconer who served as Lord Chancellor in Tony Blair's Labor Government and is now the House of Lords’ most energetic campaigner for legalized euthanasia. Falconer has put forward a bill proposing that terminally ill people should be allowed to prepare “death contracts.” These would be legally binding documents, counter-signed by a witness and two doctors, that would allow someone to take a lethal dose of drugs under the supervision of a physician.

Tully responded to Falconer’s latest attempt to loosen the law, saying that it will be targeting “the lonely and disabled elderly.”

He said SPUC Pro-Life will be collaborating with disability rights groups, health professionals and pro-life politicians “to resist Lord Falconer’s proposals with all our strength.”