{"id":1129,"date":"2011-06-15T10:44:32","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T09:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=1129"},"modified":"2011-06-15T14:46:35","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T13:46:35","slug":"pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2011\/06\/15\/pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance\/","title":{"rendered":"Pratchett and Assisted Dying: A Question of Balance?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve not yet seen &#8220;Choosing to Die&#8221;, Terry Pratchett&#8217;s film about Dignitas from Monday night, I recommend that you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/iplayer\/episode\/b0120dxp\/Terry_Pratchett_Choosing_to_Die\/\">go and watch it now<\/a>. \u00a0(I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s available outside the UK: I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;ll appear on YouTube soon, though; or, if you&#8217;re outside th UK, get a Brit to download it and put it on a USB for you. \u00a0It&#8217;s worth it.) \u00a0It&#8217;s an astonishing piece of film-making: simultaneously gripping, heartbreaking and deeply uncomfortable. \u00a0And it raised all kinds of hard questions. \u00a0Was Peter Smedley, the man whose death was filmed, making a genuine choice? \u00a0He looked as though he was in the process of signing a contract to have his hall decorated, so calm and rational was he. \u00a0Wouldn&#8217;t you expect a bit less detachment? \u00a0A bit less bloody <em>Englishness<\/em>? \u00a0But then, how much emotion do you want? \u00a0One of my problems with the unbearable suffering criterion in Joffe&#8217;s Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill a few years ago was that the more someone&#8217;s suffering, the more it&#8217;s legitimate to worry about the clarity of their thought. \u00a0Smedley seemed very clear.<\/p>\n<p>And what about Andrew Colgan? \u00a0<!--more-->From what we see on the film, he has difficulties &#8211; but nothing that other people don&#8217;t deal with, and nothing that has to be too terrible. \u00a0When he tells Pratchett that he has an appointment booked at Dignitas <em>and then says when it is<\/em>, it&#8217;s a chilling moment. \u00a0Isn&#8217;t that the wrong time? \u00a0But then, the right time is no less wrong. \u00a0Having to wait until your life is awful to die is a bit like being unable to leave the casino until you&#8217;ve lost your shirt. \u00a0Better to die while, as a very dark pun towards the end of the programme says, the going is good.<\/p>\n<p>The Dignitas doctor we see looks at first to be something of an evangelist for assisted dying; but then she says that she wants to help people commit suicide because she&#8217;d find herself unable actually to kill. \u00a0Is this a consistent position? \u00a0I think it is. \u00a0An admirable one? \u00a0That&#8217;s harder.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s Pratchett&#8217;s own reaction (and that of his assistant) that makes the film what it is. \u00a0We know already that he supports AD; it&#8217;s moving to see how he struggles with the reality of it. \u00a0He is not proselytising; rather, he&#8217;s clearly wrestling with himself and the reality of what he supports. \u00a0He doesn&#8217;t change his mind, but he&#8217;s clearly uncomfortable.<\/p>\n<p>The film has been criticised by some. \u00a0Damian Thompson called it a &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/damianthompson\/100092115\/why-is-the-bbc-so-keen-on-people-topping-themselves\/\">plug for Dignitas<\/a>&#8221; in his <em>Telegraph<\/em> blog, which it certainly wasn&#8217;t:\u00a0the clinic that foreigners have to use is a mock-up suburban house on an industrial estate. \u00a0It&#8217;s decorated tastefully but blandly; it looks a bit like patients are going to Center Parcs to die. \u00a0The staff come across as personable, but also a bit distant. \u00a0(Mind you: would you want them not to be?) \u00a0If this is a plug, it&#8217;s pretty inept. \u00a0Mind you, Thompson also falls back on the preferred tactic of his erstwhile <em>Telegraph<\/em> colleague George Pitcher in combining <em>ad hominem<\/em> attacks with lamentable levels of thought:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You have to say this for Sir Terry: Alzheimer\u2019s has not dented his self-regard. On the contrary, he seems to think it gives him the moral authority to campaign for the legalisation of a really serious criminal act.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(I hate to point it out, but the action is only a criminal act by virtue of the law. \u00a0Since noone denies that it&#8217;s serious, Thompson seems to be saying that we should only legalise legal stuff.)<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Telegraph<\/em> seems to have had it in for the film from the start, though. \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/culture\/tvandradio\/bbc\/8574762\/BBC-flooded-with-complaints-over-Choosing-to-Die-documentary.html\">Tuesday&#8217;s edition<\/a> said that the BBC had been &#8220;flooded&#8221; with complaints. \u00a0898 people had been in touch &#8211; but that seems like a very small flood, given viewing figures in the millions. \u00a0And I&#8217;m genuinely puzzled about what the nature of the complaint might be. \u00a0Had they actually been watching the same film as I?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The corporation said 898 people had registered their disapproval of the documentary presented by the author Sir Terry Pratchett, with 162 fresh complaints <strong>since it aired<\/strong> on Monday night. [emphasis mine]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ah. \u00a0That&#8217;ll be a &#8220;No&#8221;, then. \u00a0So of the 898 complaints about the programme, 82% were received <em>before it was even shown<\/em>. \u00a0They can&#8217;t, therefore, be complaints about the programme, so much as being about the very idea of the programme. \u00a0(For its part, the <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-2003256\/Anti-euthanasia-backlash-hits-BBC-Terry-Pratchett-shows-death-Dignitas.html?printingPage=true\">Mail<\/a><\/em> doesn&#8217;t even admit that 736 of the complaints were received before the programme was shown.)<\/p>\n<p>For its part, the Christian Institute was marshalling the troops days before the programme aired, with articles that called it &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.christian.org.uk\/news\/\u2018shameless-propaganda\u2019-suicide-to-air-on-bbc-tonight\/\">shameless propaganda<\/a>&#8221; and claimed that it may cause &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.christian.org.uk\/news\/doctor-says-bbc-show-risks-copycat-suicides\/\">copycat suicides<\/a>&#8220;. \u00a0Again, though, these were published prior to broadcast, it&#8217;s hard to see how they could be held to be well-grounded. \u00a0An item from after the broadcast called the film biased &#8211; but you&#8217;d hardly expect it to say anything else. \u00a0And I wonder what might count as a non-biased film anyway?<\/p>\n<p>This was, explicitly, a film about people who&#8217;d decided to go to Dignitas. \u00a0It wasn&#8217;t about proclaiming the virtues of assisted dying: as I&#8217;ve said, we know where Pratchett stands, and the film made it abundantly clear how hard he found being confronted with the reality of that belief. \u00a0So it&#8217;s hard to know what &#8220;more balance&#8221; would look like.\u00a0\u00a0Balance isn&#8217;t just about having equal numbers of talking heads gainsaying each other &#8211; and it&#8217;s not obvious what there would be to gainsay in this programme anyway, since it didn&#8217;t advance any claims. \u00a0&#8220;Balance&#8221; in the CI&#8217;s view could mean someone on the programme rehearsing the arguments against AD &#8211; which would have missed the point of the programme to begin with\u00a0(on which note, Geoff Morris has a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/debate\/article-2002411\/BBC-suicide-documentary-Im-terminally-ill--saccharine-portrayal-appals-me.html\">column in the Mail<\/a> about the programme in which he rehearses the familiar worries about AD, and it&#8217;s not a bad piece &#8211; but it is nevertheless a piece about the problems of AD that uses the Pratchett film as a hook; it doesn&#8217;t really address the film directly); or it could mean not showing the film at all. \u00a0But that wouldn&#8217;t be balance, either &#8211; it&#8217;d just mean continued ignorance.<\/p>\n<p>Death at Dignitas, from the looks of this film, may be the best death that some people think they can have; but it&#8217;s not a good death. \u00a0On the other hand, what is?<\/p>\n<p>(H\/T to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.butterfliesandwheels.org\/notes\/\">Ophelia Benson<\/a> for some of the links)<!--TrendMD v2.4.8--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve not yet seen &#8220;Choosing to Die&#8221;, Terry Pratchett&#8217;s film about Dignitas from Monday night, I recommend that you go and watch it now. \u00a0(I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s available outside the UK: I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;ll appear on YouTube soon, though; or, if you&#8217;re outside th UK, get a Brit to download it and [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2011\/06\/15\/pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1240,1273,511,591,475,577,472],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogosphere","category-ethics-education","category-in-the-news","category-life-and-death","category-politics","category-resource","category-thinking-aloud"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Pratchett and Assisted Dying: A Question of Balance? - Journal of Medical Ethics blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2011\/06\/15\/pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pratchett and Assisted Dying: A Question of Balance? - Journal of Medical Ethics blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If you&#8217;ve not yet seen &#8220;Choosing to Die&#8221;, Terry Pratchett&#8217;s film about Dignitas from Monday night, I recommend that you go and watch it now. \u00a0(I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s available outside the UK: I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;ll appear on YouTube soon, though; or, if you&#8217;re outside th UK, get a Brit to download it and [...]Read More...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2011\/06\/15\/pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Journal of Medical Ethics blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-06-15T09:44:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2011-06-15T13:46:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"BMJ\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"BMJ\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2011\\\/06\\\/15\\\/pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2011\\\/06\\\/15\\\/pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"BMJ\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/ba3da426ed20e8f1d933ca367d8216fe\"},\"headline\":\"Pratchett and Assisted Dying: A Question of Balance?\",\"datePublished\":\"2011-06-15T09:44:32+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2011-06-15T13:46:35+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2011\\\/06\\\/15\\\/pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1138,\"commentCount\":6,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/#organization\"},\"articleSection\":[\"Blogosphere\",\"Ethics education\",\"In the News\",\"Life and Death\",\"Politics\",\"Resource\",\"Thinking Aloud\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2011\\\/06\\\/15\\\/pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2011\\\/06\\\/15\\\/pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2011\\\/06\\\/15\\\/pratchett-and-assisted-dying-a-question-of-balance\\\/\",\"name\":\"Pratchett and Assisted Dying: A Question of Balance? 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