{"id":767218,"date":"2026-09-11T11:58:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T11:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/767218\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T11:58:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T11:58:12","slug":"mps-debate-assisted-dying-bill-for-england-and-wales-ahead-of-new-commons-vote-follow-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/767218\/","title":{"rendered":"MPs debate assisted dying bill for England and Wales ahead of new Commons vote – follow live"},"content":{"rendered":"

Widower says his wife would’ve chosen assisted dying but instead became ‘living skeleton’published at 11:21 BST<\/p>\n

11:21 BST<\/p>\n

Rozina Sini
BBC Your Voice<\/p>\n

\"JennyImage source, Janice CuerImage caption, <\/p>\n

Jenny Short passed away yesterday after being diagnosed with cancer<\/p>\n

As MPs continue to debate the assisted dying bill, readers have been sending in their thoughts.<\/p>\n

Frank Short’s wife Jenny died yesterday at a care home, after being diagnosed with cancer in summer. <\/p>\n

Short, from Shepton Mallet, Somerset, says by the end of Jenny’s life, his “extremely active” wife was “a shadow of her former self and looked like a living skeleton”.<\/p>\n

“This was not a dignified death,” he says, and he believes if she had the choice, she would have “terminated her life when she was still her”.<\/p>\n

He explains they both caught a virus in February, but she never recovered. <\/p>\n

She was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the end of July and went to a care home near Wales and was there for six weeks as she “gradually deteriorated”.<\/p>\n

“At the end she could not communicate, she could not move, she could not swallow, she had not eaten for weeks and had been unable to take fluids for several days.”<\/p>\n

“The assisted dying bill should pass,” he says, praising the care home staff but saying his wife had “no control”.<\/p>\n

“This made my wife suffer.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Widower says his wife would’ve chosen assisted dying but instead became ‘living skeleton’published at 11:21 BST 11:21 BST…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":767219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-767218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/767219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}