Touching the Assisted Suicide Void

Eloquent, determined, heedless of personal risk, the British journalist Derek Humphry was a born campaigner. In 1975 he helped his cancer-stricken wife to commit suicide, then wrote a book about the episode, daring the police to come after him. It never went to court—then as now, the authorities applied the law in this area leniently—but Humphry made it his lifelong goal to overturn the 1961 Suicide Act, which prohibits assisting or encouraging suicide. After moving to America, he married again, to a fellow enthusiast called Ann Wickett; they co-founded the pioneering pro-assisted suicide group the Hemlock Society, which grew to 30,000 members.   

But at this point, the story takes a strange turn. In 1990 he and Ann, who was suffering from cancer, divorced; the following year she took her own life, leaving a note in which she told Derek: “Ever since I was diagnosed as having cancer, you have done everything conceivable to precipitate my death. . . . What you did—desertion and abandonment and subsequent harassment of a dying woman—is so unspeakable there are no words to describe the horror of it.”

In her last years, Ann Wickett Humphry had turned against the right-to-die movement, growing steadily more disturbed at the possibility that people might be subtly encouraged into requesting lethal drugs. She suffered terrible remorse at having helped her own parents to take their lives. And she began to feel that the whole movement was a kind of deception.

Derek Humphry denied Ann’s accusations. But reading her story, you get the same sort of shiver as when you read about Killick Millard: the founder of Britain’s assisted suicide campaign group—which has since become Dignity in Dying—who lobbied for the release from prison of the Austrian doctor Sigbert Ramsauer, guilty of carrying out euthanasia injections in a Nazi work camp.

The same shiver as when you learn about Mark Lyons, prominent member of the same organization under the name Exit, who would visit members’ homes on demand with a “suicide kit” of gloves, plastic bags, and drugs, and who once told a woman who was having doubts over her suicide request: “You bloody stupid bitch. . . . There will be no questioning of my commandment, none.” You get the feeling, with these stories, of looking into a pitch-black void.

On Friday, Britain’s House of Commons voted, by a narrow margin, to amend the Suicide Act against which Derek Humphry so long campaigned. If the House of Lords now passes the bill—and nobody knows quite what they will do—then assisting a suicide will become legal, as long as the suicide is of a terminally ill person; and as long as the whole thing is carried out through a process involving two doctors and an “expert panel.”

The doctors and experts are supposed to make the whole thing safer; but as several medical bodies have observed, the whole process falls far short of normal care. Usually, if a doctor is treating someone who is depressed, homeless, broke, unable to get the treatment he or she needs, or who feels like a burden, a doctor is supposed to offer whatever support possible to help that person go on living. But under Britain’s assisted suicide bill, as long as the patient meets a rudimentary standard of eligibility (not being actively coerced, basic decision-making ability, “six months to live” by a broad definition), he or she can be killed with the assistance of the state.

We know Britain’s MPs know this, because they quite literally voted for it. An amendment to the bill, tabled on Friday morning by the Tory MP Rebecca Paul, would have prevented anyone receiving an assisted suicide if the choice was motivated by depression, disability, financial insecurity, housing issues, or lack of access to public services. Under the bill as it stands, anyone with a six-month prognosis (an unreliable metric in itself) can receive assisted suicide for any reason: This was an attempt to limit the potentially vast scope of the bill. It was rejected.

To be strictly fair, some MPs said they voted against the amendment because they didn’t think it could be put into practice. But given that they didn’t bother to come up with a more workable version, that only underlines the point. The House of Commons, albeit by a tiny majority, was happy with an assisted suicide law that will endanger a great many people currently hanging on by their fingertips. It is not hard to picture them—the patient reeling from a terminal diagnosis; the grandfather feeling guilty about draining his family’s time and money; the teenage girl whose anorexia has reached a point where a doctor gives her a month to live; the people movingly described by the doctor Alexander Chula:

Consider: a victim of child sexual abuse whose response was compulsive eating, leading to his being bedbound with morbid obesity and cardiorespiratory failure in his early forties; an intravenous drug user gang-raped on her council estate who struggles with adherence to HIV treatment; a man with learning difficulties who went blind after his eye surgery was cancelled during the pandemic, now forced by accelerating frailty into a nursing home in despair; a woman confronting the same inherited disease that killed her mother and grandmother, alone and poor after sacrificing her youth to their care; a young woman with advanced heart and kidney disease because, as an adolescent, her diabetic control was hampered by a chaotic home situation. . . . If the patients I’ve described requested an assisted death, you could make a very compelling case for it—which is precisely what makes them so vulnerable, and this legislation so dangerous.

The debate around assisted suicide laws is a little like the dilemma facing the mountaineer Simon Yates in the film Touching the Void. Do you cut the rope linking you to your climbing partner down below, not knowing whether he is hanging over the edge of a cliff?

There is a link that binds us to our fellow citizens in their suffering: that we will never, ever, encourage or assist them in taking their own lives. Some people—not all of them religious—believe that the rope can never be safely cut, and regard every possible assisted suicide law as dangerous. Others think the rope could be cut in some circumstances, but not the current ones. They oppose such laws, not on principle but because they fear the immediate consequences: especially in a country like Britain with a universal, monolithic healthcare system, in which a culture of suicide could so easily spread and take root.  

The cinematic analogy doesn’t quite work, because in the film it’s a genuine dilemma. Yates doesn’t know what is happening at the far end of the line. But MPs do know, or should know, just who will be affected by the cutting of the rope. It was a momentous day last week, in the slow-motion discrediting of Britain’s institutions, when they went ahead and did it anyway.

“There,” Ann Wickett Humphry told Derek in her final note. “You got what you wanted.”