Debbie Purdy: The Next Assisted Suicide Round in the UK

I was contacted over the weekend by the BBC. A radio program was dealing with the lawsuit being brought by Debbie Purdy to allow her assisted suicide. Purdy has MS and wants her husband to be able to take her to Switzerland for assisted suicide. But since he is not a citizen, she fears there could be legal ramifications for him after her death. So, she seeks a court order to prevent prosecution.

The BBC wanted me to explain the legal ramifications that could befall her husband. I said I could not explain those because I am an American lawyer, not one from the UK. But noting that Purdy has the very disease as my good pal and anti assisted suicide activist Mark Pickup, I suggested they contact him to be part of the program—as somebody who is and has been where Purdy is physically—who could convincingly present the anti-assisted suicide message. Needless to say, they weren’t interested in such a relevant presenter and rushed off the phone.

The Purdy case is similar to the Diane Pretty case that roiled the UK several years ago—about which I was brought over the Pond to debate and advocate—in which a woman dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease sought unsuccessfully to obtain a court order allowing her husband to participate in her suicide without legal consequence.

With all of the suicide tourism (nearly one hundred lives of UK citizens ending by assisted suicide in Switzerland) and lawsuits such as Pretty’s and Purdy’s, one could become discouraged and believe that the anti-assisted suicide voice is weakening in the UK. But for all of these cases and the bias of the BBC—which in my experience is similar to that of American media—there are still some strong voices urging against legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide. One is the Telegraph’s commentator Alasdair Palmer. From his most recent column on the issue:

Just as the “right” of a 17-year-old to volunteer during wartime for front-line service can generate the sense of obligation to sign up, so the “right” to die can create the feeling that there is an obligation to stop being a burden and exercise that right. Once the option is explicitly available, there would be pressure to take it. And, in that situation, what could you say to your mother or father to convince them that you really did not want them to do so? There is nothing you could convincingly say. And knowledge that the option was there would hover uneasily over every meeting and poison it...

The present situation unquestionably has many drawbacks. But it would not be an improvement if every very ill person knew that doctors were authorised to help them die from the moment they chose to say the word. Dignity in Dying, the pressure group that aims to change the law so that it explicitly licenses euthanasia, supports Ms Purdy’s appeal. The organisation claims that “the current law is failing the vulnerable”. I think that is the opposite of the truth: the current law protects the vulnerable—those very ill people who might only too easily feel pressure, real or imagined, from their families to cease being a burden or a cost or an irritation, if the option of “getting out of the way” was explicitly and unambiguously sanctioned by the law.

The hard part is getting people to see that in the face of the emotional appeal of people like Purdy and Pretty. But we must keep trying.