Do We Have The Right To Die? With Lady Hale and Rowan Williams (Part Two)

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**Mia Sorrenti** (1:21)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti.
Should assisted dying be enshrined as a fundamental right? Or does it place our most vulnerable citizens in profound danger? In this episode, we'll return for part two of our recent live debate with former Supreme Court President, Lady Hale, and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
Hale and Williams joined us at King's Place to discuss the urgent and divisive question of assisted dying. Chaired by doctor and broadcaster Dr. Zan Van Teleken, this event marked the launch of Do We Have The Right To Die, the second book in our partnered Think Again book series published by The Bodley Head. If you haven't heard part one, we recommend jumping back an episode to catch up. But now let's return to the discussion live at King's Place in London.

**Zan Van Teleken** (2:10)
You talked about criteria and circumstances, and the resources question raises issues which they found in Canada, where people say, my life is unbearable because I'm homeless, because I live in terrible poverty, and these solutions could be found to these things. These are not unsolvable problems.
To what extent could a law allow for those things, and to what extent should we consider that differently to someone with a severe illness?

**Brenda** (2:43)
Well, as I understand Canadian law, it doesn't allow for those to be criteria. You've got to have a permanent, incurable medical condition. Doesn't necessarily have to be terminal immediately, but you do have to have that, as I understand it. And I would stick with that sort of criteria.
I mean, there is a moral case, but I'm not saying that I share it. They say that this is a matter of free choice, and for whatever reason I find my life unbearable, I should be able. Well, of course, you can already bring about your own death. So we're really talking about the circumstances in which somebody else is free to help you.
And I think we're completely justified in restricting that to the sorts of medical situation that we've been talking about.

**Rowan** (3:36)
If I can just come in on the Canadian situation. My understanding is that there are some quite troubling statistics about the disproportionate uptake of MAID in disadvantaged areas in Canadian cities. I spoke to friends in Quebec about this, who said that the percentage of medically assisted deaths in one of the more impoverished areas of Quebec was greater by a factor of about four or five than it was in more prosperous ones. That again ought to give us some pause about how even if you're not directly saying, I want to die because I'm poor, pressures of different kinds, levels of attention, levels of investment by physicians are going to vary in socially diverse contexts. And that's also a factor which has been noted in Oregon, for example, where again a significant percentage of people approaching assisted dying or having asked for assisted dying will register economic pressure or social, I don't know, social disadvantage as a factor in their request.
So we're back in a way to the tiresome slippery slope argument. I say it's tiresome because it feels like a, not quite special pleading, but it feels like a get out of jail free card here. But it is a factor here. And the arguments, as I tried to say in what I wrote, the arguments for the legal provision of physician assisted dying that rest upon intolerable discomfort, pain, or whatever, are the same arguments that can be used by people in mental distress, in extreme poverty, and so on. There's no obvious break in the argumentation leading from one to the other, which is why in contexts like Canada, Oregon, and the Netherlands, there has been that slippage. If I can use a rather loaded term, though, that's, I think, why the whole social, economic, political context somehow has to be factored in, in the long view here. And I don't quite know what you do about it.