Most (though sadly by no means all) people in modern Britain have assisted dying: they are assisted in their mortal illness by family, friends and the NHS rightly so.
Its uncritical use of the term “assisted dying” is itself evidence of this. It is clear from the BBC’s extensive ensuing coverage where its sympathy lies. There has been, of course, a big response to Dame Esther’s thinking out loud.
If it does not work, however, “I might buzz off to Zurich”, by which she means the Dignitas clinic there. As she herself told the BBC’s The Today Podcast on Wednesday, her own expectations of her death have already been confounded: after her diagnosis last year, “I thought I’d fall off my perch within a couple of months, if not weeks.” Now she is undergoing a “miracle” treatment. But Dame Esther Rantzen, never shy, has done so.ĭame Esther is suffering from stage four lung cancer. The week before the annual commemoration of the most celebrated birth in human history seems an odd time to concentrate media attention on death.