Esther Rantzen, deep into treatment for lung cancer that cannot be cured, has made an intervention in the assisted dying debate that is unignorable: she has already joined Dignitas, she says, and “might buzz off to Zurich”. Yet she worries that her friends and family would want to be with her, but that could open them up to prosecution. She wants to see a free vote in parliament on assisted dying.
I can’t help placing this in the constellation of Rantzen’s life’s work, a huge number of campaigns spanning decades, always focused on the pragmatic, the uncontroversial: consumer rights; the rights of children not to be abused or neglected; loneliness and elder abuse. She has been an object lesson in not needing to be radical or original in order to make change. Indeed, sometimes just making the commonsense case for justice is enough, so long as you’re loud and trenchant.
Assisted dying, though, is so contested that legislators treat it like an electric fence – MPs have been nosing up to it and backing away for decades. Rantzen is telling a story bigger than her own personal circumstance, and she knows it: 84% of Britons now back doctor-assisted dying for terminally ill people. The march of medicine is extending our lifespans, but in doing so it also extends the length of our departure. Do we want to keep surrendering our autonomy to laws that were framed in a different time?
Diana Rigg’s daughter, Rachel Stirling, described in heartbreaking detail the last few months of Rigg’s life: “It’s gone on too long – push me over the edge,” her mother asked. The request was of course impossible, but it shouldn’t have been. “End of life is not for wimps,” Stirling wrote. But, forgive the bluntness, the legislation surrounding it was framed by wimps: people to whom mortality itself is so horrific that it can only be placed in the lap of the gods. While I understand that tendency exists, I cannot accept that Rantzen or Rigg, or any of us, should have to capitulate to it.
My dad had the fastest death imaginable (by me); we barely had time to get used to him not being able to finish the crossword before he was there, at home, surrounded by family, dying the dream. My mum is having the slowest death imaginable (by me): emphysema or, to describe it more accurately, drowning in air, that has gone on for more than a decade. Neither of them needed or need a change in the law – my mum, if she wanted, could take her own life without assistance. At least, I assume so – she fixed her own boiler.
The point is, death is an extremely bespoke experience, in which the cause, the progression, the pain, the personality, the life force, all interact in ways that are completely idiosyncratic. The idea that anyone could draw a set of rules around it, beyond “respect this person’s wishes, dignity and comfort, at this fundamental, frontier point in their life”, is completely fanciful to me.
I hear the catastrophist arguments – that family members may hurry a terminal patient along, for their own ends – and I find it unconscionable that we would ever build our norms and customs around them. Are we seriously happy consigning real people to extra months or more of pain to thwart some fantasy gothic villains who want to get their hands on the family silver? Religious arguments, meanwhile, really have to be restricted to the holders of faith: the majority of Britons have no religion.
Over the summer, the House of Commons conducted an investigation into assisted dying, in which it was told that 540 British people had gone to Dignitas since it opened in 1998. The number wasn’t huge, which is thought to reflect the cost and the taboo of the Zurich clinic, but it was telling: the majority of people going to Dignitas are from countries where there are laws against assisted dying – Germany, France, the UK (Germany overhauled its law in 2020, France is in the process of doing so). People who are given the choice of where and when to die do not go to Switzerland, they die at home.
Giving evidence to the Commons investigation, one Dignitas employee described how medics tended to be in favour of assisted dying, but stayed quiet about it, “for fear of repercussions”. This code of silence is steadily breaking down: after surveying their members, the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons have all dropped their opposition to assisted dying, and adopted a position of neutrality.
Sarah Wootton, the chief executive of Dignity in Dying, hopes 2024 will be a tipping point, as legislation in Scotland, Jersey and the Isle of Man offers a realistic prospect that some Britons will have the right to die by 2025. There is no shortage of appetite for change, but the block, as Rantzen correctly identifies, is parliament. She is right to push for a free vote; she is right to speak openly about her experience, her wishes. Yet the real tragedy of this question is that it is left to people who are dying to spend their final months as their own beseeching advocates.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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