Debbie Purdy

Debbie Purdy (4 May 1963 – 23 December 2014) was a British music journalist and political activist from Bradford, West Yorkshire. After being diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, she challenged the law in England and Wales regarding assisted suicide. In 2009, revised guidelines on assisted suicide law were published by the UK Government following Purdy's campaign.

Purdy's case Debbie Purdy and her counsel David Pannick QC argued that the Director of Public Prosecutions (Ken Macdonald QC) was infringing on her human rights by failing to clarify how the Suicide Act 1961 is enforced. No family member of the 92 Britons who have gone abroad for an assisted suicide had been prosecuted at that time, but some had been charged and later had the charges dropped. Purdy said that if her husband would be exposed to prosecution for helping her travel to Switzerland to a Dignitas clinic to die, she would make the journey sooner whilst she was able to travel unassisted. This would save her husband from exposure to the law but would have forced Purdy to make her decision on dying before she felt it was absolutely necessary. There had also been the case of 23-year-old Daniel James, who went to Switzerland with the aid of his parents after being paralysed whilst playing rugby, in which the Department of Public Prosecutions determined that to prosecute the parents would be against the public interest. Purdy entered the Marie Curie Hospice in Bradford in June 2013 and in December 2013 she began to intermittently refuse food. She described the length of time it was taking to die as "agonising". Purdy died on 23 December 2014, aged 51.

Book and radio play Purdy wrote a memoir entitled It's Not Because I Want to Die (2010, HarperTrue: ). On 26 February 2019 BBC Radio 4 broadcast Joy Wilkinson's dramatisation of Purdy's book, as Test case: Debbie Purdy. It was followed by a discussion, Test Case: The Legacy of Debbie Purdy, between professor Deborah Bowman, Purdy's husband Omar Puente, her lawyer Saimo Chahal QC, and barrister and peer Charlie Falconer.