jo church 😷

Ah, you must have missed her on @BBCNewsnight in 2008 opposing Assisted Suicide? Her 2 part @bbcworldservice doc in 2013 'When Assisted Death is Legal'? Assisted Suicide The Musical in 2016/17? Her @BBCone @OpenUniversity @RTS_media award winning doc "Better Off Dead?" in 2024??

There's a hard truth at the heart of the Assisted Dying Bill, and it cuts through every soft phrase and staged plea: once a state grants itself the right to kill the vulnerable "for their own good," it stops being a guardian and starts being an executioner. Canada proved it. Britain now stands on the threshold of the same mistake, telling itself it can build a clean, clinical path to death without it spreading to those who were never meant to die. The supporters of assisted dying sell it as mercy. They hold up terminal cancer patients and unbearable pain as the moral shield. But the moment the law is written, the shield vanishes. The language widens. The categories spread. What begins as a narrow doorway becomes a floodgate. Every country that has legalised assisted dying has drifted in the same direction – towards killing not the dying, but the despairing. And despair is something the NHS manufactures by the day. Sophie Turner, who has fought her own eating disorder, exposes the lie at the centre of Kim Leadbeater's bill: "terminal" can be stretched to cover anyone failed by a broken health service. In Colorado, women with anorexia were declared "incurable" simply because they couldn't get treatment. Their starvation was rebranded as a terminal condition. They were given lethal drugs while telling their families they wanted to live. But death was quicker, cheaper, easier. That is the road Britain is on. A failing NHS. Long waits for mental-health care. Clinics turning away patients because they're "not thin enough." In this world, the bill isn't compassion – it's an escape hatch for a system that can't cope. The danger isn't people begging for death, but a system nudging them toward it. The backers of the bill imagine calm autonomy – a rational adult choosing their fate. But eating disorders destroy reason. Depression lies. Trauma twists thought. These illnesses create the very hopelessness the law would interpret as "consent." To treat a starving girl's lowest moment as her settled will is not dignity; it is dereliction. It is the state shrugging and saying, "We cannot save you – but we can kill you." And now we hear talk of "Personal Navigators" – an NHS death service guiding people to the end. A bureaucracy with a timetable, ready to usher the vulnerable from first doubt to lethal dose. The National Health Service drifting into the National Death Service. Canada offers the warning in blood-red letters. Veterans offered euthanasia instead of therapy. Disabled people told their care was "too expensive." Homeless citizens seeking death because they couldn't afford rent. Doctors openly discussing "cost savings." It is the logic of a system that discovers killing is cheaper than caring. That is the lesson Britain must stare in the face. This bill poses as compassion, but its real engine is convenience. A country that valued life would fix palliative care and mental-health services instead of offering a state-approved exit. Sophie Turner, Gail Porter, Stephanie Waring – women who have lived through the madness of eating disorders – see what the legislators refuse to see. These are not "terminal" people. They are recoverable people failed by the system. That is why their intervention matters. They understand the darkness. They know what it is to want to vanish. And they know how temporary that feeling can be. Give these women this law when they were at their lowest, and they would not be here to speak at all. A civilised country heals despair. It doesn't weaponise it. The Assisted Dying Bill may begin with the dying – but it ends with the vulnerable. That is the truth Britain must face before it sleepwalks into a Canadian nightmare, dressed up as compassion but driven by a cold arithmetic: life is costly, death is cheap. "Sophie Turner, who has fought her own eating disorder, exposes the lie at the centre of Kim Leadbeater's bill: "terminal" can be stretched to cover anyone failed by a broken health service."

Liz Carr