Ahead of Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill making its way to the House of Lords for Second Reading on 12 September, celebrity proponents of assisted suicide have been ramping up their public support for the Bill.
Among these were Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, who said in August that they were both in favour of assisted suicide while promoting their latest film, The Thursday Murder Club. The two “absolutely believe” in assisted suicide as a “warm and loving” way to die — a romanticised view of a purposeful ending of life that is entirely at odds with the loneliness and isolation experienced by many who go down that dark road.
The film follows a group of elderly friends who form a club to discuss old cold-case murders. When a murder occurs close to home, they begin investigating.
Mirren’s character realises that one of their friends, who has been unresponsive in a coma for the duration of the film, committed one of the original cold-case murders, while her husband committed a recent murder to prevent this from being revealed.
Rather than report these murders to the police, Mirren’s character allows the murderers to carry out a euthanasia-suicide on themselves to save their reputations.
One character, played by Ben Kingsley, gives a eulogy at their joint funeral, saying, “Sometimes, good people do bad things. But what John did, he did for love. For the love of Penny”.
This bizarre denouement portrays this euthanasia-suicide as being a caring, morally right choice for the two individuals to make, a strange sentiment given that they both escape any form of punishment for their criminal actions for doing so.
Contrary to the sunshine and roses account of assisted dying seen in The Thursday Murder Club, there are two points worth making. First, assisted dying as a means to escape justice is not confined to fiction. Just last month in New South Wales, Australia, a convicted paedophile who sexually abused no fewer than 14 people became the first prisoner in the state to die as a result of assisted dying. He had served only seven years behind bars.
The paedophile’s daughter, also one of his victims, said that “The sense of justice I have been clinging to has been ripped away and he has taken the easy way out.” She was not told that her father had chosen to die in this way, and when she found out, she was left suffering with PTSD as she felt that “he has won”. While such cases may be rare, they strike at the heart of our ideas of criminal justice and introduce a kind of state execution by the back door.
Second, the ableist undertones of assisted dying legislation in this film are reflective of real life. In the film, a woman with a profound disability — she is in a coma, after all — is euthanised, entirely robbing her of her autonomy. Furthermore, and obviously enough, this is done without her knowledge or consent. Director of the pro-assisted suicide lobby group “My Death, My Decision”, Graham Winyard, seems to have missed the fact that there was no choice for the euthanised woman when he praised Mirren and Brosnan’s views on assisted suicide, stating “that compassion, dignity, and choice should guide our laws at the end of life”.
Once again, this point is not confined to fiction. As places like Canada show, if assisted dying becomes law, it is rarely long before there are attempts to expand its eligibility criteria. In 2021, just five years after legislation permitted state-assisted suicide and euthanasia, the Canadian Parliament repealed the requirement that the natural death of those applying for euthanasia or assisted suicide be “reasonably foreseeable.” This essentially made euthanasia on the grounds of disability alone possible, as illustrated by the fact that, of those people who ended their lives by assisted dying in Canada in 2023 and answered questions on disability, 58.3 per cent of those whose death was not reasonably foreseeable self-identified as having a disability.
Legislation was subsequently introduced in February 2024 so that euthanasia and assisted suicide would become legal on the grounds of mental health alone in March 2027.
The ableism behind assisted dying has been noted by prominent people with disabilities such as Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, a former Paralympian, who said recently that any legalisation of assisted suicide “fundamentally changes [disabled people’s] relationship with society. Every disabled person who writes to me — and they do write quite a lot — is absolutely terrified about what this means for them”.
Vicky Foxcroft MP, Labour’s former Shadow Minister for Disabilities, recently changed her view on assisted suicide, only becoming opposed to it herself after realising that “the vast majority of disabled people and their organisations oppose it”. Unsurprisingly, no major disability advocate groups in the UK, including Disability Rights UK, Scope and Not Dead Yet UK, support this bill.
For all the talk of care and compassion, the clearest possible way that politicians could show this is by ensuring that the assisted suicide Bill does not become law. Peers must understand just how dangerous this Bill is and the disastrous consequences that it would certainly have for society’s most vulnerable. Hopefully, peers will focus on the reality of assisted dying rather than the rose-tinted perspective presented in The Thursday Murder Club and touted among its cast.
