We need a taboo-breaker like Esther in our debate
CHRISTMAS is a time for joy and good cheer, but for Esther Rantzen, this year’s celebrations are tinged with anxiety. The legendary broadcaster, who has terminal cancer is due to find out whether the miracle drug that is treating her condition is still working and how much longer she can expect to get out of it.
If the news is hopeless, the 83-year-old says she might ‘buzz off’ to Dignitas in Switzerland, to spare her children the ordeal of seeing their beloved mother dying in agony – a trauma that Esther believes would supplant their happy memories of her.
‘I’m determined to do everything I can to try to achieve a good death, including flying to Zurich for a quick lethal dose of something, if necessary,’ she says.
The That’s Life presenter also calls for a free vote on assisted dying to lift the ban in the UK which carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
No sooner had her appeal rang out than Tory minister Michael Gove chimed in to say that while he was unconvinced by the pro-assisted dying arguments, he backed her calls for a Commons vote on the issue. Labour leader
Keir Starmer reiterated his support for legal change.
It appears that Esther – who leveraged her fame and fortune for society’s benefit in 1986 when she set up Childline and again in 2013 to establish Silverline, the UK charity for elderly people suffering loneliness – may, despite her illness and infirmity, have a third campaign in the offing.
EVEN if that’s her last word on the matter, she’s managed to move the dial on a debate that stirs up strong feelings and legitimate fears as well as profound ethical and philosophical questions. It’s a measure of the extraordinary power of some household names to force us to think about moral dilemmas and catch up with changing attitudes. Esther has neither the intellectual heft of an academic nor the experience of a medical expert. Yet because she seems so relatable, so engaged in ordinary life, so wise to its pleasures and its pain, her influence is almost unmatched.
Gay Byrne had a similar authority, nudging us towards a more pluralist society but no one since has enjoyed comparable levels of affection or respect.
True, by laying bare her painful experience of infertility, Rosanna Davidson changed the perception of surrogacy from the crude caricature of rich Western families exploiting the women of Third World for babies into something deeper that bonded two women together forever. Brian Dowling has also played a part in normalising gay fatherhood. But neither he or Rosanna enjoys a fraction of Gay Byrne’s or Esther Rantzen’s moral authority – that ability to slice through taboos and say the unthinkable that flows from their status as household names.
Esther’s support for assisted dying may shock some of her fans. Her contemporaries, who are edging towards a stage of greater dependency in life, might be surprised at her promotion of a change in the law that has the potential to heighten their vulnerability.
The juxtaposition of Esther’s life-affirming and optimistic personality – her upbeat ‘can do’ attitude that has brightened so many lives – and the defeatism that seems inherent in the decision to end one’s life before it comes to its natural close may also seem jarring.
BUT it is exactly these paradoxes that make her intervention in the UK debate so thought-provoking. Meanwhile, in this country, an Oireachtas joint committee on assisted dying has been hearing from all sides in the debate.
Experts, politicians and advocacy groups argue that euthanasia will eventually become the default way to die and will make powerless people even more vulnerable, while the opposing team insists that those with terminal illnesses should have the right to end their life to avoid unnecessary suffering.
Who will win the day? Perhaps we need someone of Esther Rantzen’s stature – who is at the coalface, so to speak, moving towards that bleak borderland between life and death – to change the conversation.