British novelist Sir Terry Pratchett has defended his BBC TV documentary which showed the death of a millionaire hotelier suffering from motor neurone disease against criticism from groups opposed to assisted dying.
In Choosing to Die, screened on Monday night, the 63-year-old writer, who has Alzheimer’s disease, went to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to see Peter Smedley take a lethal dose of barbiturates.
Michael Nazir-Ali, the retired Bishop of Rochester, condemned the program as “science fiction,” while Care Not Killing (CNK) said it was “a recipe for elder abuse and also a threat to vulnerable people.”
The BBC said it had received 898 complaints, with 736 of those registered before the program was broadcast.
The corporation also said 82 people had contacted it to praise the show, which attracted an audience of 1.64 million people.
Asked why he wanted to make the film, Pratchett told BBC TV’s Breakfast show: “Because I was appalled at the current situation. I know that assisted dying is practiced in at least three places in Europe and also in the United States. The government here has always turned its back on it and I was ashamed that British people had to drag themselves to Switzerland, at considerable cost, in order to get the services that they were hoping for.”
Smedley, 71, traveled from his mansion on the Channel Island of Guernsey to the clinic, which in the past 12 years has helped 1,100 people to die.
“Peter wanted to show the world what was happening and why he was doing it,” Pratchett said. “You can tell in the film that I’m moved. The incongruity of the situation overtakes you. A man has died, that’s a bad thing, but he wanted to die, that’s a good thing.”
Campaigners accused the BBC of helping to promote assisted dying and of consistently portraying the practice favorably.
Writing on the Christian Concern Web site, Nazir-Ali said: “Real life is different from Sir Terry’s science fiction ... The Judaeo-Christian tradition is a surer guide. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is about acknowledging the gift and dignity of human life which, whether ours or another’s, we do not have the competence to take.”
Warning of the risk of copycat suicides, CNK called for the UK government to investigate the way assisted dying is covered by the BBC.
CNK campaign director Peter Saunders said the BBC breached international guidelines on suicide portrayal and, as such, posed a significant risk to vulnerable people.
Pratchett is a patron of Dignity in Dying, which campaigns for a change in the law to allow assisted dying.
“At the heart of the assisted dying debate ... is choice and protection,” Dignity in Dying chief executive Sarah Wootton said. “People suffer at the end of life and therefore people take difficult decisions about their own deaths.”
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