As MPs examine the issue, one thing is clear: terminally ill people shouldn’t have to beg for the right to die with dignity
There are limits to how much you can infer from the 540 British people who have elected to die with the help of Dignitas since it opened in 1998: it’s hard to tell how many more people would make this choice if they had £10,000, which is how much it typically costs.
But one figure, which came out in this week’s House of Commons’ assisted dying investigation, tells its own story: Britons constitute more than one in seven of the people who end their lives in this way; roughly the same proportion are French; in the majority by far are Germans, at 40%. The German government overhauled the laws on assisted dying in 2020, and the French are in the process of doing so, recognition of a fact so obvious that it is astonishing anyone should have to say it out loud: most people don’t even want to go to a hospital to die, let alone travel to another country.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
