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On the Media

The Only Inevitability

On the Media

WNYC Studios

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4.68.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2021

⏱️ 37 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Inside the euthanasia underground.

Transcript

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0:00.0

700,000. That's the latest COVID death count to dominate a headline in the United States.

0:10.9

Over the last 19 months, we've seen a steady trickle of these morbid milestones in the news.

0:16.4

They are one way to measure and try to understand the COVID-19 pandemic.

0:22.5

In the world of journalism, death is a metric. It's important. It indicates significance,

0:29.2

newsworthiness, tragedy. But death also is an inevitable part of the human experience. This is a fact that Katie Englehart highlights in the title of her new book,

0:41.7

The Inevitable, Dispatches on the Right to Die.

0:46.5

Katie Englehart is a former NBC and Vice News journalist.

0:50.4

Her story about the outbreak of COVID-19 and Kirkland, Washington, won a George

0:55.8

Polk Award for magazine reporting. In her book, which came out last March, she focuses on the

1:01.7

stories of six people who are seeking physician-assisted debts. Katie, welcome to the show.

1:08.7

Thanks so much for having me. In your book, you spoke to people who are looking for help dying.

1:15.6

You also spoke to their family members, doctors, right-to-die activists.

1:20.1

What got you started on this fraught topic?

1:23.6

I think the origin of this book is sort of less than exciting.

1:45.3

I was working as a staff reporter in London. I was assigned to cover a sort of predictable parliamentary debate happening in Britain about whether or not to pass right-to-die legislation. You had people arguing that right-to-die law is allowed for patient autonomy and dignity at the end of life. On the other side, you had people arguing that right-to-die law is allowed for patient autonomy and dignity at the end of life.

1:50.4

On the other side, you had people arguing that there would soon be a slippery slope. And if we passed these laws, we'd end up in a situation where vulnerable people would be kind of coerced into premature death.

1:58.4

In the end, the British government didn't pass the law.

2:00.7

But it was in the course

2:01.8

of reporting that legal story that I became aware of a lot of things happening outside of the law,

2:09.0

outside of public conversation. I realized there were many people in Britain and beyond who

2:15.0

weren't waiting for legislators to pass laws. There was,

2:18.9

in effect, a kind of underground of euthanasia advocates and euthanasia seekers who were making

...

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