Legal shift could save families from criminal jeopardy of assisted suicide

IT was the worst thing she ever did as a doctor and it has haunted her every day of the last 15 years.

She came from a brainy family, dominated by medicine. Her parents and grandparents were medics. It was almost inevitable that she, too, would study medicine and she did, spending time at the Mayo Clinic, where she met her psychiatrist husband.

Her career as a consultant anaesthetist was well established before she gave birth to twins — a boy and a girl — and took a year at home with them before returning to work, first in the US, then in a major acute hospital here in Ireland.