A MOTHER who helped her son to die is calling for terminally ill people to be given the right to end their own lives with medical assistance.

Heather Pratten, 84, from Rayleigh, helped her son Nigel, who suffered from Huntington’s disease, commit suicide at home in 2000.

Heather helped Nigel die on his 42nd birthday at his flat in Plaistow, East London. Without legal medical procedures available, Nigel took a heroin overdose to end his life.

Heather is now calling for laws to be put in place to allow people to chose to end their lives with the assistance of doctors.

“I have known that have been in absolute agony with illnesses, including my son. Why shouldn’t they be able to say that they have had enough, providing they’re within the last leg of their life,” she said.

“Where it’s legal already, in America and Canada, it’s not been taken advantage of, it’s been working.”

Heather, whose experience forms part of a 2015 book called 'Assisted Dying: Who Makes the Final Decision', says medically assisted suicide would have allowed her son to have a proper send-off with his whole family.

“Nigel would have loved to have had all his family around him, instead of just me and him being alone in that flat. He would have loved his family around to say a proper goodbye to them all."

She added: “Nobody wants to die alone, do they. Nobody wants to die in great pain. What amuses me is that people say it’s god’s will how long you live. If that’s the case, why do doctors treat people. They can give them help in that way but not in assisted suicide.”

Nigel's method for ending his on life saw him take enough heroin to overdose. He and his mother lay down together and talked about his life.

They fell asleep, and when Heather woke up four hours later she 'could see he was almost dead, and pulled a pillow gently over his head', she said in previous testimony.

Heather was charged with murder, later reduced to aiding and abetting suicide, after a post mortem revealed Nigel was so close to death her actions had not made any difference.

She was given a year’s conditional discharge after the judge sympathised she was trying to help her son escape from an incurable condition and lessen his pain.

The Assisted Dying Bill, which would allow terminally ill adults to legally seek assistance to end their lives, will have its second reading in the House of Lords on Friday (October 22).

If passed, it will enable adults who are of sound mind and have six months or less to live to be provided with life-ending medication with the approval of two doctors and a High Court judge.