On November 29, when MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill passed second reading in the U.K. Parliament, people in wheelchairs gathered outside of Westminster wept openly. At the same time, Dame Esther Rantzen celebrated. She called the vote a “huge relief” and “something I never expected to see.” Rantzen has said that when she ultimately opts for assisted suicide, she’d like to go out after a meal of champagne and caviar.
These two reactions are a perfect microcosm of the contrast unfolding in the U.K.’s assisted suicide debate. On one hand, a wealthy, privileged person celebrating her “right to die.” On the other, the despair of the vulnerable, marginalized disabled who will pay the price for her crusade. Before the vote, Rantzen told the BBC that the U.K.’s euthanasia ban is “cruel” and “terrible.” She claimed that the law “forced” people like her to travel to Switzerland to die alone in a Dignitas clinic.
The unsayable truth is that people like Dame Esther Rantzen have options when they are suffering. People like those in wheelchairs in front of Westminster do not. Kim Leadbeater and her activist allies at Dying with Dignity, however, are speaking for the Esther Rantzens in society – and resolutely ignoring those with disabilities who are asking, desperately, for parliamentarians to uphold laws that they see as essential bulwarks against deeply ingrained societal discrimination.
If the U.K.’s ban on euthanasia and assisted suicide is, in fact, “cruel” enforcement of suffering, it is worth asking why organizations representing society’s chronic sufferers are so staunchly opposed to legalization. Why are most palliative care specialists so opposed to assisted suicide? Why is every single organization advocating for people with disabilities opposed to assisted suicide? Why are organizations representing the psychiatric profession sounding the alarm? What are they telling us that euthanasia activists are not?
Indeed, even Dame Esther Rantzen – who made the astonishing claim last year that “assisted dying” has no impact on palliative care – provides us a case study highlighting the dangers of assisted suicide and the inherent imprecision of these deadly decisions. As Yuan Yi Zhu noted recently in the Telegraph:
In January 2023, television presenter Dame Esther Rantzen was diagnosed with lung cancer. By May, her cancer had reached stage 4, and by the end of that year she had joined Dignitas. The next year, she extracted a promise from Sir Keir Starmer that he would allow time for an assisted suicide Bill to be debated in Parliament.
Like many cancer patients, Dame Esther did not expect to survive very long. In 2023, she told a journalist that: “I thought I’d fall off my perch within a couple of months, if not weeks. I certainly didn’t think I’d make my birthday in June, which I did, and I definitely didn’t think I’d make this Christmas.” Certainly she had reason to think her time on earth was short: the average life expectancy for stage 4 lung cancer is one year.
Yet she is still with us today, more than two years after her diagnosis, thanks to Osimertinib, a decade-old “wonder drug” which inhibits the growth of her cancer. As she wrote last Christmas, despite the constraints imposed by her condition, “my own life is still worth living and enjoyable.”
If Leadbeater’s deceptively named “Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill” takes effect, Zhu observes, many people will be deprived “of the additional time [Rantzen] has enjoyed thanks to modern medicine” due to the bill’s current iteration making assisted suicide an option for those whose death “can reasonably be expected within six months.” Zhu adds:
But as Rantzen’s own case shows, to predict how long a patient has to live is a notoriously difficult – if not impossible – task. According to a 2017 study, doctors’ predictions that their patient was likely to die in 6 to 12 months were wrong 54 per cent of the time; their prognoses were less accurate than a coin toss. All the Leadbeater Bill requires is that doctors should believe in their own assessment of a patient’s life expectancy. This is despite the evident unreliability of such predictions.
Moreover, if they are wrong and the patient undergoes assisted suicide as a consequence, there are no recourses – if the patient is dead it will obviously be impossible to ever know if the doctors’ assessments were right or not. Even more worryingly, experts have warned that the Leadbeater Bill would allow those who suffer from severe eating disorders to be eligible for assisted suicide; they can claim it because refusing food and water would bring down their life expectancy.
However, amendments proposed by parliamentarians to prevent these predictable eventualities have all been voted down, along with most of the other proposed safeguards. Zhu poses the question: “How many wrongful deaths are we prepared to tolerate as a society?” If the Canadian case study is any indication, it appears that once the euthanasia Rubicon is crossed, wrongful deaths simply become part of social reality. Those who were killed cannot complain; their grieving loved ones can be brushed off with a pithy progressive retort about “autonomy” and “choice.”
Dame Esther Rantzen has made herself central to the U.K.’s debate on assisted suicide. In fact, she is the perfect case study for the dangers of Leadbeater’s bill. She is a privileged person with options, opposed by marginalized people without options. She insists that the current laws are “cruel”; the U.K.’s chronic sufferers say those laws protect them. And in the greatest irony, Rantzen has gotten to enjoy more of life than she might have if the bill she currently advocates had been law at the time of her diagnosis.
UK’s assisted suicide battle has pitted the rich against the downtrodden – LifeSite