In 2021, the Sunday Times took up the cause of Douglas Laing, a man who wrote to the paper “in support of the move to legalise assisted dying”. His own determination to change the law was informed by a secret he was only now making public – in 1998 he had illegally injected his first wife Christine with lethal drugs, pre-empting her expected death from terminal cancer. Laing was clear in his assertion that Christine had chosen this death; he had merely helped.
Laing was a useful case-study for the Sunday Times. The paper was already running an editorial campaign to legalise “assisted dying”, launched as the crossbench peer Baroness Meacher introduced a supportive Private Member’s Bill in the Lords. (As I wrote in 2022, those of us who are sceptical prefer the term “assisted suicide”, whereas “assisted dying” should refer to ethical palliative care.)
Both were advised by Dying in Dignity, a charity which campaigns for dying people “to control the timing and manner of their death”. In practice, this usually means allowing someone to help them; suicide, although it devastates relatives, is already legal.
Dying in Dignity also supported Laing, when the police announced they were looking into Christine’s death. The Sunday Times thundered in his defence, with an editorial describing Laing as a “loving husband” facing an “idiotic inquiry”.
Then, something inconvenient turned up. Private Eye reported that Laing, the “loving husband”, had a history of violence against women. In 2017, he had been sentenced to three years in jail for attacking his second wife, Susan, hitting her around the head three times with a mallet. At the time Laing was gushingly interviewed by the Sunday Times, at which point he claimed to have a new partner, he had only recently been released from prison.
It has become a quiet assumption that it is simply a matter of “when”, not “if”, assisted suicide is legalised in this country. As the political parties launch their manifestos, a few policy areas – taxes, immigration, national security – have dominated the election campaign. But read each manifesto closely, and they also reveal more intimate ways in which the next government will change how we live and die.
Every party is gearing up for a parliamentary debate on assisted suicide. Sir Keir Starmer, widely expected to be the next prime minister, has said he is “personally committed” to finding parliamentary time to introduce relevant legislation. That would bring us into line with US states such as Oregon – whose state law is the model for Dignity in Dying’s campaign – or Canada.
What has been left out of the public debate is the outsized impact in those regions of assisted suicide laws on the poor, the disabled and women.
If we talk about assisted suicide, we need to talk about sex and gender. We know sex starkly affects every statistic we already have about suicide. We know that able-bodied men are far more likely to die by suicide than women. We know this reflects the different pressures on men and women – with young men struggling under societal expectations of uncomplaining strength – and also their attitude to communal ties: mothers are far less likely to die by suicide, leaving children behind, than fathers.
But look at the statistics for suicides enabled by other people, and something flips in the gender assessments. In nations such as the Netherlands which allow “psychiatric euthanasia” – for example, doctor-assisted death for the depressed – 69-77 per cent of people who choose it are women. We know from elsewhere that women who have experienced domestic violence are amongst those most likely to die by suicide.
If you raise concerns about which segments of society are most likely to be pressured into assisted suicide, or likely to choose it as a response to mental trauma, you will be told that any such law – Baroness Meacher’s draft, for example – would provide suitable safeguards.
Many of the country’s leading campaigners for “assisted dying” are clear that they are only campaigning to extend this option to those who are terminally ill. That’s also the terms under which the first such laws were introduced in Oregon in 1997; since then, Oregon doctors have offered medically-assisted suicide to the anorexic, the arthritic, and people with a hernia. In Canada, doctors have been caught offering doctor-assisted suicide to the homeless, those struggling to access disability benefit, and veterans with PTSD. Sometimes a slippery slope really is a slippery slope.
Even for the certifiably terminally ill, it seems unlikely that anyone makes end-of-life decisions truly free from the hurtling costs of end-of-life care. This, too, has a gendered dimension. In Australia, women who requested assisted suicide were far more likely than men to give as a reason that they did not wish to be a burden on families caring for them. (It is surely relevant that heterosexual men are more likely than women to leave a partner who starts to need care.)
In a world in which men are still pressured to be providers, and women to be carers, men are most likely to die by suicide at a life stage – youth to middle age – when they find themselves struggling to provide financially, while women do so at a life stage – old age – when they are the person requiring care.
If we do accept “assisted dying” in principle, we will be accepting as a nation that people should actively partake in conversations about the timing of their loved ones’ deaths. Yet those campaigning for this cultural shift also now pretend that when someone chooses death, she can always do so free from the pressures of family or finance. (It remains bizarre to see this pitched by the left – to use leftist language, it requires as radically neo-liberal world view as there can be; the autonomous individual wrenched free of community.)
The cause of “assisted dying” has been promoted by prominent celebrities, broadcaster Esther Rantzen among them. But it is not the wealthiest among us who know what it is for a family to struggle for the cost of care, or the mixed incentives this creates. No wonder this shortcut to death has been opposed most fiercely by campaigners for the disabled.
It may be too late for opponents of assisted suicide to win this argument. But the next government will need to show it has considered the consequences for the most vulnerable groups. My particular plea is that no “assisted dying” law should pass without an independent assessment of the impacts around sex and gender.
And male or female, the law should prevent any person with a conviction for domestic violence from “assisting” the death of a partner. In honour of the Sunday Times’s poster-boy, we can call it Douglas’s Law.