America doesn’t usually get a lot of praise for its social safety net.
But Liz Carr, a British television personality and disability rights activist, says the US gets something very right.
While many Western governments are making it possible for the terminally sick to end their lives with assisted suicides and euthanasia, those efforts have largely hit a roadblock in the US, she says.
For Carr, a wheelchair user since a teenager, this is vital, because assisted dying laws put pressure on disabled people to end their lives prematurely and stop ‘being a burden’ on their families and carers.
‘We’re told that these laws sweeping the West are inevitable,’ Carr, 52, told DailyMail.com.
‘But look at what’s happening in the US. At any one time, there are bills in 25 states to allow assisted dying, but they continue to fail. For the past three years, it’s been at a standstill — there’s nothing inevitable about it.’
Carr is best known for playing a forensic scientist in the BBC crime drama Silent Witness. She’ll be back on screens in the US after filming the third season of Good Omens, a fantasy comedy.
She’s suffered from since childhood arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, a rare genetic disorder of the muscles and joints, and recently became a campaigner for disability rights and against assisted dying.
Last month, she screened her documentary about the subject, Better Off Dead?, to lawmakers and influencers in Washington, DC.
Among the guests were California congressman Lou Correa, a Democrat, and Ohio Republican Brad Wentrup.
Advocates of assisted dying say the terminally sick should be allowed to die with a doctor’s help, by lethal injection or getting a prescription for lethal drugs to be taken at home, to end their suffering.
But Carr and others say that’s been terrible for disabled people across the parts of Europe, , New Zealand, and Canada, where it’s allowed.
Catholics and other religious groups are also opposed, on moral grounds.
Now, the UK parliament, which was long hostile to assisted dying, will weigh a proposal to allow procedures before the end of 2024 — in part due to a pre-election pledge by Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The way Carr tells it, these laws leave disabled people feeling ‘frightened and threatened.’
‘For somebody who loses their job or a loved one and is left feeling suicidal, others will rally around and support them with suicide prevention help,’ she says.
‘But as soon as that’s a disabled or ill person, people think it’s fine for them to have a medically-assisted death. They think it’s better to be dead than to be disabled.’
She highlights Canada, which has one of the world’s most developed euthanasia programs.
There, disabled people complain of being repeatedly offered lethal injections when all they really want is help to live and get around more easily.
In a notorious example, Christine Gauthier, a Canadian army veteran and former Paralympian, was offered a doctor-assisted death when she was fighting to have a wheelchair lift installed at her home.
‘As long as we’re unequal, and certain groups are devalued, no safeguard will protect us,’ says Carr.
Starting with Oregon in 1997, ten US states and Washington DC have made assisted suicides legal.
Patients must be at least 18 years old, within six months of death and be assessed to ensure they can make an informed decision.
It’s usually reserved for residents of those states, but Oregon and Vermont recently started to allow non-residents to travel and use their systems.
At least a dozen states introduced bills to legalize physician-assisted death this year, but none of them has so far made it on to the lawbooks.
This has led to heart-wrenching stories of people stricken with terminal diseases urging officials to pass laws that will let them escape from their suffering.
In a tragic example, Ayla Eilert died in April 2022 just seven months after she was diagnosed with cancer which left her in agonizing pain that doctors were unable to relieve.
The 24-year-old repeatedly asked for a doctor-assisted death, but was denied because such procedures are not legal in her home state of New York.
John Carney, the Democratic Governor of Delaware, last month vetoed a bill allowing assisted dying in his state, saying he was ‘fundamentally and morally opposed’ to the procedures.
AMC is caused by permanent contractures affecting one or more parts of the body, which means joints become fixed in a bent position.
Symptoms are present at birth and contractures usually affect the legs or arms.
Symptoms include contractures, abnormally slender or fragile long bones, cleft palate, abnormalities of the nervous system.
There is no known reasons why AMC occurs.
AMC affects 1 in 3,000 people and an equal number of males and females have the condition.
Source: Rarediseases.org
Meanwhile, lawmakers in Kansas and West Virginia moved this year to tighten their laws against assisted dying.
‘This tells me that people are really thinking,’ says Carr.
‘They don’t want to make whole groups of people feel afraid, especially those who already feel very vulnerable.’
But while most US states outlaw assisted suicides, some sufferers of cancer and other grave medical problems will continue to seek a doctor’s support to end their plight.
Last month, a 64-year-old woman from the US Midwest travelled to Switzerland and became the first person to use a ‘suicide capsule’ in a forest in the northern Schaffhausen region near the German border.
The 3D-printed capsule is designed to allow a person sitting in a reclining seat inside to push a button, which injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber, allowing them to fall asleep and then die by suffocation in a few minutes.
The woman, who died, has not been named. Members of The Last Resort group that helped her use the futuristic ‘Sarco’ pod were arrested by Swiss police. It’s unclear whether the devices are legal there.
Organizers said the woman’s death was ‘peaceful, fast and dignified’ — but those claims could not be independently verified.
The woman reportedly suffered from a severe immune compromise.
Carr questions why a US citizen travelled some 4,500 miles to die in a pod, now that Oregon and Vermont allow out-of-staters to use their assisted-dying systems.
‘I’m really interested in why she felt she had to do that, when she had access to assisted suicide in her own country,’ says Carr.
‘Maybe her lists of conditions were not so severe that she did not qualify.’
Carr lived in the US for two years in her childhood and says she fondly remembers its ‘diners and candy.’
She looks forward to returning to the screens in the US with the third season of Good Omens, in which she plays the angel Saraqael. The British show has been available in the US on Prime Video.
She’ll also appear in a play, Unspeakable Conversations, in London, which depicts the remarkable real-life encounter between disabled US lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson and Princeton University bioethics professor Peter Singer.