The Other Half Podcast

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.
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We learned:

• How the campaign for AD has focused on cultural change - something high profile campaigners planned to take 10-20 years.
  

The oddly sinister (and otherwise unexplained) press association quote from Deborah Annetts, Voluntary Euthanasia Society CEO in 2002. It’s certainly the case that a barrier was broken: The Netherlands now euthanises women with mental health issues, and children.

• 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]
Assisted: Death and Women
Women are dying under assisted dying laws at rates that should alarm us all—but few people are paying attention. Assisted, hosted by Chelsea Roff and Fiona Mackenzie, dives into the data and stories behind it, asking why these laws disproportionately impact women and what it says about society’s view of illness, disability, and care. Through conversations with researchers, policymakers, and families navigating the fallout, Assisted explores the vulnerabilities these laws expose—and what that means for all of us.

This coming week the committee for the Assisted Death Bill at Westminster will consider whether doctors assessing for assisted death should be given training on coercive control and financial abuse. The Other Half think that many hundreds of domestic abuse victims will be given assisted deaths each year - see our written evidence here.
That’s why we’re so pleased to talk to one of the leading experts in domestic homicide here in the UK - Professor Jane Monckton Smith. Once a police officer, she is now Professor of Public Protection at the University of Gloucestershire and the author of In Control, which upends the myth that a domestic homicide is a loss of control.
In this astonishing conversation we ask:

• Why is no one talking about domestic abuse, coercive control and assisted dying?
  
• The UK is a trailblazer in defining coercive control in legislation. Why would we think other countries with assisted dying have good models for dealing with coercion into assisted death?
  
• How suicide of domestic abuse victims is so overlooked: and how this dwarfs homicides by perpetrators. What might suicide look like if lawful death is on offer?
  
• How abusers think when illness hits their victim and their control is disrupted. How this leads to victims of abuse being more likely to be diagnosed only when their illness is terminal and not treatable.
  
• Why training in domestic abuse is a good amendment to make to this bill: but Jane is sceptical given we call all the time for more training for police and agencies.
  

We want MPs to hear what Professor Monckton Smith has to say, so please share this widely.
Last week the committee voted down all safeguards supported by eating disorder charities. Still little sign of this bill becoming the safest law in the world. Will this change?

In Westminster this week, MPs will reconvene to continue line-by-line scrutiny of the Assisted Dying Bill. As the committee returns, key questions remain: Could people with conditions such as diabetes and anorexia be considered terminally ill? Are doctors equipped to detect coercion and ensure vulnerable women are not pressured into ending their lives? How will the lethal drug regimens used in assisted death be regulated? And with palliative care services already underfunded and overstretched, could this bill leave some patients feeling they have no real choice but to end their lives?
In this episode, we speak with Professor Katherine Sleeman, Laing Galazka Chair in Palliative Care at King’s College London, and Professor Mark Taubert, Professor of Palliative Medicine and a Palliative Care Consultant at Velindre Cancer Centre.
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They share their concerns about the consequences of the bill, the practical realities of implementing so-called safeguards, and the grave risks that may arise if eligibility criteria are left open to interpretation. Drawing from their own experience working in the NHS and international evidence, they leave us wondering if protections that sound robust on paper can withstand real-world pressures— and what this could mean for the future of end-of-life care in the UK.
Some helpful references Mark and Katherine discussed:

• Efficacy and safety of drugs used for 'assisted dying'
  
• The Doctors Who Invented a New Way to Help People Die
  
• Factors Leading to Prolonged Deaths in Aid-in-Dying
  

This is our third discussion with the experts who can tell us how Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying panned out. Tonight we speak with two doctors who know more about MAID than they ever would have dreamed. Chelsea and Fiona welcome:
Dr Ramona Coelho, a family physician in London, Ontario. She is also a member of the Ontario Chief Coroner’s MAID Death Review Committee, and so is one of the few people to see the data on the true outcomes of MAID.
Professor Leonie Herx, a palliative care doctor, clinical professor at the University of Calgary, and recent president of the Canadian Palliative Care Association.
Each has seen how MAID unfolded and how it affects the practice of medicine, attitudes to suffering and dying, and most importantly, their patients. They tell stories that lay out the human costs of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying.
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Leonie and Ramona discuss:

• That Canadians were told assisted dying would only be for exceptional cases
  
• How safeguards quickly become barriers
  
• How the MAID ‘providers’ interpreted the law so that even more people could die: including Ellen Wiebe’s use of actuarial tables to estimate life expectancy of her patients and justify their access to death.
  
• The lobbying efforts of Canada’s well funded Dying with Dignity organisation also covered in “The Lobby Group That Owns the Conversation around Assisted Deaths”
  
• That it’s not true to say that MAID has seen an increase in quality and resourcing of palliative care: in fact some palliative care budgets now deliver MAID
  
• Instead of suicide prevention, patients will be sent away with a MAID phone number
  
• That it may take months or years for their patients to get disability support, but a MAID assessment is available in 3 days
  
• Ramona’s work with the Ontario Chief Coroner MAID Death Review Board: reports here
  
• The shocking rise in widows seeking an assisted death
  
• How coercion and domestic abuse emerges over months of time with a patient: compared to the 90 minutes MAID assessors will spend over the phone with them
  

Today we continue to hear from experts on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, which seems to have spiralled beyond anyone’s worst imaginings.
Tonight, we have three powerhouse legal academics: feminists who work to limit the terrible excesses of Canada’s MAID. Fiona and Chelsea were so pleased to speak with:
Professor Emerita Elizabeth Sheehy, latterly professor of criminal law at the University of Ottowa
Professor Isabel Grant, specialist in criminal law at the Peter Allard School of Law at the University of BC,
Professor Janine Benedet, who explores legal responses to men’s sexual violence against women at Peter A. Allard School of Law at University of BC.
These women are truly fabulous: clear talking, clear thinking, and absolutely on the side of women. They also do most of their work on MAID unfunded. Their recent discussion and paper says that MAID is “a modern form of eugenics”. In this wideranging discussion we learn:

• How MAID’s wild expansion was won through campaigning and courts: but ultimately the Canadian parliament decided to pursue each major expansion in the law.
  
• Those who deliver death have expanded the law even further in practice.
  
• The role of (male) mercy killers (of women) in the campaign for assisted death,
  
• What safeguards against coercion are
  
• That we won’t know about men who pressure family members into MAID unless someone speaks out.
  
• How death has become part of the menu of options proposed - pushed - to vulnerable people seeking healthcare. Even psychiatric care.
  
• The silence of the feminist organisations as MAID unfurled its horrors
  
• the weird funders of death including an airport authority
  

Up next: the family doctor who investigates MAID and the palliative care expert