Call to Action: Join the Conversation on Assisted Suicide and Help Amplify Disabled Voices

We wanted to get in touch with you as you may be aware that there is going to be a documentary featuring Prue Leith (yes, that one!), who is a supporter of assisted suicide, and her MP son Danny Kruger, who is against assisted suicide and is leading the Parliamentary campaign to ensure assisted suicide is not made legal in the UK.

The programme goes out on Channel 4 this Thursday (February 16th) on Channel 4 at 9pm. Here are the details:

Prue and Danny’s Death Road Trip | All 4 (channel4.com)

We’ll be tweeting in the run-up to the programme from the @notdeadyetuk Twitter account, commenting on media pieces. We’ll also tweet during the programme itself.

What we want you to do

We want our members with social media accounts to contribute to the conversations around assisted suicide. There is a strong leaning in favour of assisted suicide in the media at the moment, and that’s reflected to an extent on social media platforms. We want to ensure the voices of disabled people are heard.

What we don’t want or need you to do

There’s no need to engage directly with assisted suicide campaigners or the organisations they support. We’re trying to avoid increasing their volume.

What are we trying to get across?

There’s growing evidence and concerns about the rapid growth of people who are becoming eligible for assisted suicide in Canada and the application of the criteria. We’ve always been very worried about this.

This is causing problems for our opponents, who have in the past said the Canadian assisted suicide laws are working perfectly well.

So we are raising the profile of this issue and the dangers of assisted suicide legislation and reminding people that we would like help to live, not die.

We’ll be saying:

• There’s no way to legislate for assisted suicide that is safe
• All other countries which have put in place assisted suicide legislation have relaxed their criteria for applying it
• Canada is seeing growing groups of people being offered MAID (medical assistance in dying), including people with eating disorders and other treatable conditions
• There’s a need for better provision of palliative care in the UK so people get the health and social care support they need at the end of their lives
• Disabled people want support to live, not assistance to die.

What about references and resources?

Here’s a Twitter thread from Danny Kruger from earlier this month, citing examples of people who have received MAID in Canada:
Danny Kruger on Twitter: “I’m on Newsnight later talking about the Canadian experience of euthanasia. I won’t have time to cite all these examples of what’s going on… all presented to MPs this week by Canadian doctors @LeonieHerx and Dr Ramona Coelho at a meeting of @DyingWellAppg. Read on:” / Twitter

This is an article from the Scotland Herald quoting a Canadian palliative care expert on the disaster unfolding in Canada.

Scotland be warned: Canada’s euthanasia law has been horrific | HeraldScotland

And there are articles from our founder, Baroness Jane Campbell, and others on the news pages of the Not Dead Yet website, which you can quote from.

News – Not Dead Yet UK

Any help you can give to make out voices better heard would be really welcome. If you have any queries or questions, do get in touch with Phil Friend on brinkburn@gmail.com or Ben Furner on Ben@furnercommunications.co.uk.

Thanks in advance for your help!