A British mother and daughter are campaigning for legalized assisted suicide, and described it as the ideal way to die. The reality, however, is rather different.
Dame Esther Rantzen, a broadcaster, was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and though she is currently undergoing treatment, she said she plans to kill herself at Dignitas in Switzerland if treatment isn’t successful. In the meantime, however, she is urging lawmakers to legalize assisted suicide in the United Kingdom.
“I explained to them that actually I don’t want their last memories of me to be painful because if you watch someone you love having a bad death, that memory obliterates all the happy times and I don’t want that to happen,” she said of her family. “I don’t want to be that sort of victim in their lives.”
Most people who choose assisted suicide or euthanasia, contrary to popular belief, are choosing to die, not because they fear a painful death, but because they fear losing autonomy and not being able to enjoy life as they had before. They also fear becoming a burden on their loved ones.
Rantzen’s daughter, Rebecca Wilcox, has joined her mother in her assisted suicide advocacy, applauding Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer for promising a vote on the issue in Parliament if Labour wins in the next election. And sadly, Wilcox’s description of what she expects assisted suicide to be like is far from reality.
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“[B]oth of us have pictured our own versions of good death, as the social care and reform report called it, and it would be a wonderful bubble bath wearing every single diamond that anyone will lend us,” she said. “Possibly quaffing champagne and then taking a cocktail of whatever drugs it is to gently gently slip off with all our loved ones around us. And I mean it sounds like a fairytale, and at the moment it is a fairytale.”
The drugs in assisted suicide are the same as those used in death penalty executions; as Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at the Emory School of Medicine, has explained, though the intended use for the drugs is different, the result is still the same.
“The death penalty is not the same as assisted dying, of course. Executions are meant to be punishment; euthanasia is about relief from suffering,” he said in a previous op-ed. “Yet for both euthanasia and executions, paralytic drugs are used. These drugs, given in high enough doses, mean that a patient cannot move a muscle, cannot express any outward or visible sign of pain. But that doesn’t mean that he or she is free from suffering.”
Pentobarbital, which has been used in the majority of assisted suicides in Oregon, is known to cause pulmonary edema, where the lungs fill with fluid, causing the person to essentially drown in their own secretions. Yet the paralytic also given means it’s impossible for anyone to tell that the patient is suffering. A study in the medical journal Anaesthesia found that long, painful deaths from assisted suicide and euthanasia are alarmingly common; a third of patients took 30 hours to die, while four percent took seven days to die. Additionally, experiments with assisted suicide and euthanasia found more suffering; one cocktail was said to be “burning patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain.” It’s hardly the fairy tale Wilcox described.
“Advocates of assisted dying owe a duty to the public to be truthful about the details of killing and dying,” Zivot said. “People who want to die deserve to know that they may end up drowning, not just falling asleep.”
