It takes strength and courage to swim against an oncoming tide. Fortunately, Liz Carr had both as she stood against the groundswell calling for the legalisation of assisted dying. Or, as Carr preferred to call it in her forceful documentary Better Off Dead?, “assisted suicide”.
Most of us will know Carr from her seven-year stint as forensic examiner Clarissa Mullery in Silent Witness. Like that character, Carr has a genetic condition that affects the joints and muscles, and has used a wheelchair since the age of 14. Now 52, she has been a disability activist for far longer than she has been an actor, and has been a vocal opponent of assisted dying for more than a decade.
Carr believes that legalisation would put vulnerable and marginalised people at risk. The common assumption, she said, is that being disabled makes life less worth living. She pointed to her experiences with thoughtless comments by strangers (being told, for example: “Gosh, if I was like you, I couldn’t go on… I’d rather be dead”). Another disabled person recalls being told she should kill herself “and stop being a drain on society”.
Her film went against the grain as the Scottish parliament is set to debate an enabling bill this autumn, the Isle of Man is due to vote on legislation and broadcaster Esther Rantzen lobbies MPs to debate the issue in parliament. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has meanwhile said he would back a UK-wide change to the law. This documentary was a clearly-delivered plea for us – and more specifically, our law-makers – to think carefully before they bring assisted dying on to the statute books.
What is wrong, you might ask, with giving terminally ill people the dignity of choosing when to end it all without having to fork out on a one-way trip to Switzerland? Lord Falconer, the Labour peer who has sponsored four attempts to change the law, told Carr terminal illness was his “line in the sand”. That’s to say assisted dying would only be made available to the terminally ill. But as Carr wisely responded; “The thing about sand is that it shifts.”
To illustrate her fears about how the law could be gradually widened to include those not nearing death, she visited Canada, which legalised “medical assistance in dying” (Maid for short) in 2016, with 13,000 Canadians choosing such an exit last year. The law was widened in 2021 to include those who are “suffering unbearably but their deaths are not foreseeable”, with, Carr argued, alarming consequences.
She met Donna, whose mother had become depressed and started starving herself following a car crash. Obviously suffering from mental health issues, her mother managed to find the necessary medical officials to sign her off for assisted dying, without Donna knowing. “I wish I’d kidnapped her,” said her distraught daughter.
Carr also met Amir Farsoud, a Canadian man with a severe disability who successfully applied to the government euthanasia programme when he feared eviction from social housing. Luckily, the case made the news and charitable folk came to his assistance.
Both stories provided a chilling insight into how the laws on assisted dying could be liberally interpretated and loosely regulated.
This is even more alarming given Canada’s moves to extend Maid to “mature minors” – children as young as 12. This was especially frightening for Carr, whose mother Pat had earlier revealed her daughter had written “I want to die” in her childhood diary. She was 12 at the time. “I wish I could travel back in time and tell a younger me the truth,” said Carr. “That life – an imperfect but pretty bloody good life – awaited me.”
Indeed, the fellow disabled activists in the pressure group Not Dead Yet who bookended the documentary all affirmed their love of life. “Who would want to kill themselves over who wipes your bum?” asked one (which might not be a universal view).
Not all the disabled people Carr met were in agreement with her, and returning to the UK, she visited journalist Melanie Reid, tetraplegic since a horse-riding accident in 2010 and who writes a regular Times column about her condition. Reid argued that she has “a human right to decide what happens to my body,” adding that she saw assisted dying as an “insurance policy”.
Carr ended the film by arguing that the Government should “invest in the services that would improve quality of life” instead of giving disabled people a “way out”. But with so many powerful advocates for assisted dying and debate increasing, she is up against it.
Her film is unlikely to turn the tide against legalised access to assisted dying, but her vital intervention fully deserved a BBC soapbox. It should at least give anyone framing future laws in the UK pause for thought. “If you think this is about terminal illness, think again,” she concluded. “For me and for others, this is about disability – and that is terrifying.”
Sophie Anderson, a UK-based writer, is your guide to the latest trends, viral sensations, and internet phenomena. With a finger on the pulse of digital culture, she explores what’s trending across social media and pop culture, keeping readers in the know about the latest online sensations.
