Some People with Disabilities Want Assisted Dying

How 'Better Off Dead?' misrepresents a movement

This is my second post reviewing ‘Better Off Dead?’, the BBC documentary about medical assistance in dying by Liz Carr.

In my last post, I argued that the main argument in Liz Carr’s new anti-MAID film, ‘Better Off Dead?’, rests on an inconsistency. Disability rights activists make a good point when they express frustration at the way people make judgments about the quality of their lives. Being told, directly or by implication, that your life isn’t worth living is an injustice. The mistake Carr and the activist group Not Dead Yet make is that they then turn around and make value judgments about the quality of life for all people with disabilities.

There are inaccuracies sprinkled throughout the film, but the biggest one is the way it ignores the existence of disabled people who want to die because of their disabilities. This film—and so much of Carr-style disability rights activism—frames its message as representative of people with disabilities. Thus, there’s a scene in ‘Better Off Dead?’ where Carr and a group of her friends discuss why they oppose assisted dying. But this is unrepresentative in important ways.

The first is the film’s description of the two tracks for MAID in Canada. Carr correctly describes how Track 1 requires a reasonably foreseeable death and Track 2 doesn’t. As she says, “Track 2 makes MAID accessible for disabled people who aren’t terminal.”

This would be a good point in the film to mention that Track 2 exists because of Jean Truchon and Nicole Gladu, two people who had medical conditions that caused intolerable suffering but whose deaths weren’t reasonably foreseeable. They had disabilities—Gladu had post-polio syndrome, Truchon had cerebral palsy—and those disabilities were the source of their suffering. So, they challenged the law prohibiting them from having medically assisted deaths and they won.

Unfortunately, the film leaves all of this out. The narrative Carr is pushing is that disabled people are only allowed to access MAID because of discrimination. The real story, however, is that disabled people fought for it.

The second misrepresentation is Carr’s claim that she speaks for the majority of people with disabilities. My favourite part of the film is a scene where Carr interviews Melanie Reid, a British journalist who became tetraplegic following a horse riding accident. Reid says the following:

Where I come from on the debate is the sense that I have a human right to decide what happens to my body, and I would like to have it, and I rather sort of resent the fact that it’s almost like one small group imposing its values upon a larger group.   

For this point, please join me in welcoming Melanie Reid as the patron British journalist of this newsletter. 

In response, Carr says, “Well, I would see the small group as those wanting medically assisted suicide.”

Here, once again, Carr advances the narrative that disabled people don’t want MAID, and here, once again, Carr is wrong. We have multiple years worth of polling data to falsify this claim. In 2022, a Gallup poll found 86 percent of Canadians who identified as having a disability supported a right to MAID. In 2021, an IPSOS poll found 84 percent of people with disabilities supported MAID. Both of these polls were sponsored by Dying With Dignity Canada. I’ve never found a poll sponsored by an anti-MAID group, which is curious. For her part, Carr says in a BBC interview that she is “not a fan of opinion polls at all”, and no wonder.

Reid, our patron British journalist, pushes Carr more:

What about someone like me who isn’t terminally ill but for whom life could be unbearable in other ways, and I would like to end it. Why should my right to do that be denied? Why do I have to wait until I have something terminal until I have that right?

Now, I’m sure Carr gave an equally excellent response to this question, but when it’s your film, you can decide that you want to end the scene there, and so it does. The next part cuts to Carr in the studio, who answers Reid’s question, not with an argument, but with “That is terrifying”. (I’m of the view that, dodgy editing aside, including Reid was a blunder on Carr’s part. Her scene is going to convince people that legal MAID is the better option.)

So much of this debate comes down to the simple fact that the set of people with disabilities is diverse. Carr and her colleagues want to keep living and want better social support. I want those things for disabled people too. But the fact is that, as much as Carr et al. say they don’t want MAID, there are many more disabled people saying that they do want it.

Elsewhere, I’ve discussed disability and what I call the Overinclusive Problem. There are many types of disabilities and some of which lead people to want to end their lives, but since we can’t know beforehand which ones will do that, Canadian MAID law is appropriately defined broadly by requiring an “illness, disease, or disability.” I’ve argued that changing this to ‘serious and incurable medical condition’ would probably work just as well, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that some disabilities lead people to conclude that they would be better off dead. We should respect their choice.