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The Audio Long Read

From the archive: Death on demand: has euthanasia gone too far?

The Audio Long Read

The Guardian

Society & Culture

4.22.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2019: Countries around the world are making it easier to choose the time and manner of your death. But doctors in the world’s euthanasia capital are starting to worry about the consequences. By Christopher de Bellaigue. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is the Guardian.

0:09.0

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Visit Kingsinterhigh.kko today. The Guardian Archive Longree.

0:45.0

Longree. Hello, my name is Christopher de Belleg, and I'm the author of Death on Demand. Has

0:58.9

Euthanasia gone too far? Which was published in The Guardian in 2019.

1:06.4

What drew me to the story of euthanasia in the first place, I suppose, is a very long process

1:10.0

because my mother committed suicide when I was very young and it took many years for me to process and think that through and the relationship between euthanasia and suicide is obviously a very close one.

1:22.0

Then I started to get a strong sense that the Netherlands was the kind of furthest frontier with respect to

1:26.9

euthanasia and the liberalization of laws.

1:30.0

And it started to seem to me that what was happening in the Netherlands would eventually happen here in the UK, but also elsewhere in the world and was indeed happening, starting to happen in terms of legislation, in terms of societal attitudes, in terms of what people

1:46.7

understand to be unbearable suffering.

1:50.7

Since the article has been written, many of my predictions have turned out to be true and indeed assisted dying is one of the promises of the Labour government in the UK, a bill on assisted dying or at least assistance for that bill to come before Parliament.

2:07.0

And the movement across the world towards making assisted dying more easy is indeed gathering pace.

2:14.4

But at the same time, the things that I bring up in the piece

2:18.8

and which I think balls the piece to be widely read

2:22.2

are a certain skepticism with respect to whether or not this is a perfect

2:28.6

solution and the pitfalls that can arise when assisted dying is made easier and the kind of

2:36.0

slippage in attitudes towards death on demand as the headline of the piece

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