You might think that assisted dying campaign has new momentum in the UK, but as Olivier award winning actor and longtime disability rights activist Liz Carr tells us, the campaign has been fierce back to at least the 1990s.
Liz has been exploring the potential for great harm in assisted death for years: she presented this documentary series for the BBC World Service in 2013, and made the truly excellent recent BBC TV piece Better Off Dead?.
Chelsea and Fiona relished the opportunity to talk to someone who knows the campaign for assisted dying so well.
We learned:
How the campaign for AD has focused on cultural change - something high profile campaigners planned to take 10-20 years.
About the impressive collaboration between international dying organisations, with a ‘playbook’ for winning the campaign.
What Dignity in Dying did next when they lost the last big bill in 2015 - working hard within the medical organisations to change positions from ‘hostile’ to neutral, as announced yesterday with the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP). Previously The RCGP were the target of joint legal challenge from Dignity in Dying and the Good Law Project.
How Liz found visiting the death clinics, which look like ‘student digs’ and are the “worst place in the world to die”
Why it doesn’t matter what happens in the committee, Liz thinks, as each day bill sponsor brings it back to the invited visitors in the committee room, who face deaths they do not want.
That no one actually gets prosecuted for going to Dignitas.
What else happened this week in the world of assisted dying
Dirty politics: Kim Leadbetter’s aide silently and uninvited attended a private meeting on women’s vulnerability to assisted dying, to some outrage from women. [The Times]
More women’s organisations speak clearly: The CEO of JK Rowling’s charity for women told Scottish MSPs that “state-sanctioned killing” could open the gates to a “perpetrator’s ultimate act of control”. [The Telegraph]
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