Your life, your choice

Austin Fido

ESTHER Rantzen is dying. The British journalist, broadcaster and UK national treasure (among her many distinguished achievements, she established both Childline – the children’s counselling service – and The Silver Line, a helpline for the elderly) has reportedly exhausted treatment options for a cancer that was pronounced terminal in 2023.

It has long been known that Rantzen wants a “good death,” which for her means one that does not bring protracted pain and suffering. She doesn’t want her family emotionally scarred by watching her suffer a prolonged and traumatic period of pain and sickness. She’d rather go quickly and quietly at a time of her choosing, leaving her loved ones with memories of happier and healthier days.

Rantzen does not think of this as shortening her life, just shortening her death. She revealed her terminal cancer diagnosis in 2023, and by the end of that year she’d signed up for the assisted suicide service provided by the Swiss company Dignitas. But a positive response to new treatment rallied her health and she carried on with her beloved gardening. She’s not looking for a shorter life, just (when the time comes) a quick death.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely she will get her wish. Rantzen is said to be too frail to make the trip to Switzerland by herself, but British law would regard anyone helping her make the journey as assisting a suicide – a crime in the UK. Rantzen doesn’t want to leave her family a legacy of legal problems, so she no longer considers herself a candidate for Dignitas.

Her situation highlights the present inadequacy of the British law, which could not prevent her from going to Switzerland to end her life if she were healthy enough to travel alone, but doesn’t allow anyone to help her make the trip.

In Britain, only those strong and fit enough to travel the world by themselves can choose when and how to die. The sick and immobile are denied any such choice. When Rantzen was fit enough to end her life, she chose to keep living. Now that her quality of life appears in decline, she’s not choosing life, she’s being forced to endure it.

Rantzen’s case has been batted around the opinion pages of British newspapers for much of the last year because the country is currently debating a change to its existing laws around assisted dying. The government, to its credit, has done its best to depoliticise the debate, offering no instruction to its MPs other than to vote according to their conscience.

There are valid arguments on both sides, and one would no more want to see someone forced to compromise their religious beliefs to support assisted dying than one wants to see anyone compelled to suffer a long and painful death because the law demands it. Ultimately, however, the argument does seem to come down to personal choice. No one is suggesting compulsory early death or mandatory assisted suicide. As Rantzen has written, “It is our life. It will be our death. It should be our choice.”

Britain’s wrangling with its assisted dying laws reminded me of TT’s recent resurrection of its anti-sodomy laws. Just as decriminalising assisted suicide would not oblige you to go out and start administering lethal injections to anyone with a nasty cough, so too decriminalising sodomy did not compel the citizens of TT to set upon each other in previously taboo acts of wild fornication.

And yet the government pressed ahead with seeking to have the buggery laws reinstated, appealing to the antiquated “savings clause” in the TT Constitution that essentially asserts colonial laws predating TT’s independence are superior to citizens’ rights as enumerated in the Constitution.

Attorney General Camille Robinson-Regis stepped in recently to clarify that the current government remains committed to constitutional reform and is broadly supportive of an advisory committee’s recommendation that the savings clause be deleted from the Constitution. She also noted that any such reform would require a two-thirds majority vote in Parliament. Only two governments since 1976 have enjoyed such a majority and neither of them was a PNM administration.

So what to do? The AG didn’t ask, but I will answer: don’t go to court and argue the savings clause should reverse legal decisions. If she is inclined, perhaps the AG could explain in what meaningful sense a government that relies on the savings clause in its legal petitions is committed to the repeal of that clause? Your law, your choice to use it.