Millions die with dignity without choosing assisted suicide, but we rarely hear their stories
There is an imbalance in the debate restarted by Dame Esther Rantzen
The week before the annual commemoration of the most celebrated birth in human history seems an odd time to concentrate media attention on death. But Dame Esther Rantzen, never shy, has done so.
Dame Esther is suffering from stage four lung cancer. As she herself told the BBC’s The Today Podcast on Wednesday, her own expectations of her death have already been confounded: after her diagnosis last year, “I thought I’d fall off my perch within a couple of months, if not weeks.” Now she is undergoing a “miracle” treatment. If it does not work, however, “I might buzz off to Zurich”, by which she means the Dignitas clinic there.
There has been, of course, a big response to Dame Esther’s thinking out loud. It is clear from the BBC’s extensive ensuing coverage where its sympathy lies. Its uncritical use of the term “assisted dying” is itself evidence of this.
Most (though sadly by no means all) people in modern Britain have assisted dying: they are assisted in their mortal illness by family, friends and the NHS; rightly so. What is being spoken of here is something else – the decision to kill yourself, a decision whose execution, because of incapacity or lack of the relevant skills, you delegate to another or ask another to help with.
When I look at the coverage of such stories, I am struck by an inherent imbalance. The individuals who say how much they want assisted suicide for themselves are treated in a special way by the media. Such people’s stories are interesting and hard to challenge.
In any interview, the journalist asking the questions will naturally be respectful. The same interviewer who hopes to win plaudits by roasting, say, a government minister, knows he would be cast into outer darkness if he gave the sick and troubled patient a hard time.
In the case of assisted suicide, there is the additional problem that professional rules rightly forbid clinicians from commenting on whatever public remarks their patients might make about their treatment or their prognosis, however inaccurate those remarks might be. Media coverage of people in situations like that of Dame Esther thus breaks one of the most basic rules of reporting – “Give both sides of the story”.
I do not see how it could be otherwise. But I do think that such stories miss out something very important. They leave almost voiceless all those dying people – the great majority – who do not want to go to Dignitas or even to a British NHS version of the same thing.
This state of affairs reflects a journalistic problem. It is always more difficult to convey vividly the situation of someone who decides against a particular course of action than that of one who strikes out. It is not much of a story to report on people who do not desert their disagreeable spouses; or do not glue themselves to railings or motorways to save the planet; or do not refuse to fight in a conscript army; and so on.
If someone says, “I am content that I shall die when my time comes, without any intervention” (by which, of course, I do not mean without medical assistance), it does not make much of a headline.
This is a moral problem, too, because it means that the ordinary behaviour of most of humanity is undervalued. You see this, again, in the abduction of the word “dignity” to describe assisted suicide. Like many – perhaps most over the age of 50 – I have seen several people dear to me dying. All of them, I believe, died with dignity, none by assisted suicide.
Our culture will become less humane if we do not recognise this dignity, value it and nurture it. Indeed, society is already becoming less humane because “assisted dying” is seen as somehow superior to the way of death of most of the human race.
In one of the BBC follow-ups to Dame Esther’s original remarks, the presenter Amol Rajan said, “If you don’t have assisted dying, you have to have better palliative care.” Perhaps without realising it, he was making one of the strongest arguments against assisted suicide – that it is a means of cutting the cost and attention required to care for the dying, a policy in which convenience trumps compassion. Assisted suicide strikes against the principles of one of the most compassionate British inventions of the 20th century, the hospice movement.
Although the hard cases can be very hard, I sometimes think that there is an element in the “assisted dying” debate of what people call “First World problems”. In the materially comfortable West, our way of preparing for death is mostly not to think about it. When its approach does loom, our instinct is to try to exercise the control we believe we have in most aspects of our daily life.
This is a mistake. It is not, of course, that we should take no thought for how we die, but that death is more like being born than like anything else we experience – it is beyond our control. The people who die best are those who accept this.
“I might buzz off to Zurich,” says Dame Esther, almost as if speaking of a consumer choice. One understands the impulse, but does it really help to succumb to it?
When confronted with the legislative issues involved and voting, as is entirely appropriate on such matters, without the whip, MPs have consistently rejected assisted suicide. Pro-euthanasia lobbies feel frustrated by this and keep looking for new opportunities. This may partly explain the heavy coverage of Dame Esther.
Towards the end of next month, a private Member’s Bill on the subject is to be introduced in the Commons by Kit Malthouse MP. Expect those supporting “assisted dying” to use the occasion to argue that the House should agree the “principle” of “assisted dying” without passing any legislation at this stage.
Such a declaration would then be used to make sure that, when legislation did come along, its opponents would be under moral pressure to do no more than tinker with its details. “The will of Parliament has been made known”, the pro-euthanasia lobby would say. A similar device was used successfully in the States Assembly of the Channel island of Jersey in 2021. Members later got cold feet about what it would mean in practice. No actual law has yet been agreed, let alone implemented.
A Commons “in principle” decision would be a bad way to proceed because it would encourage MPs not to consider the problems which vex the subject. They could vote for the idea of “assisted dying” without having to address directly issues such as who should assess who should die in this way and when, who should carry out the decision, what conscience clauses the law should allow, by what means and where should people be killed, and who should pay. It would undermine the duty of care which the modern state underwrites.
Since it is Christmas, I am reminded of something that happened after the famous birth in a stable. Returned from Bethlehem, Mary journeyed to Jerusalem and presented Jesus in the temple. This was witnessed by a devout old man called Simeon, who took him in his arms and, recognising him as the bringer of salvation, spoke the famous words, still sung daily, which begin: “Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” Now he could die with dignity. DT.
