Where are women in the assisted dying debate? Leading the charge: a female MP, Kim Leadbeater, is the one piloting the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill through parliament. Practically, however, women’s interests have been consistently disregarded in this legislation. It is a law that has been written as though male violence and coercive control do not exist.
Supporters of assisted dying often make the argument that legalising it would “remove the need” for terminally ill individuals to “take matters into their own hands”. So let’s take a closer look at some of those individuals. In 2022, a man named Douglas Laing wrote an emotional letter to the Sunday Times, describing how he had given a fatal injection to his wife Christine in 1998 when she was terminally ill with ovarian cancer.
After Laing was contacted by police, the campaign group Dignity in Dying – which supports Leadbeater’s bill – accused law enforcement of wasting public money and causing unnecessary distress. It seemed, on the face of it, to be a perfect example of the humanitarian case: a suffering wife, a loving husband. Laing was never charged over Christine’s death.
But he was an unfortunate poster boy for the assisted dying cause. In 2017, he had been convicted of wounding with intent (downgraded from attempted murder) after bludgeoning his second wife, Susan, with a hammer – an attack that she said had left her “not living… just existing”. (Dignity in Dying distanced itself from Laing’s subsequent conviction.)
Then there’s the 2019 killing of 79-year-old June Knight, who was terminally ill and had Alzheimer’s. She was pushed from the first-floor fire escape of her care home by her son Robert. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received a suspended sentence, with the judge describing June’s death as a “mercy killing”. But it is very hard to imagine those frightening, confusing and catastrophically painful last moments feeling “merciful” to her.
Or there’s the case of Stuart Mungall, who in 2011 smothered his wife Joan with a pillow, then took an overdose which failed to kill him. Joan had the degenerative condition Pick’s disease and only months to live, but, prosecutors said, she had never expressed a wish to die. The day before Mungall killed Joan, she was said to have told a nurse that she was “taking it all in her stride”. Like Knight, Mungall represented his actions to the court as a “mercy killing”; like Knight, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and was given a suspended sentence.
I don’t highlight these cases to question the verdicts. But there is a pattern: a man kills a sick woman and her sickness makes the killing more understandable, despite a later incident of domestic violence (Laing) or brutality of method (Knight).
As a November 2024 report by the think tank the Other Half puts it, what are described as “mercy killings” are “very frequently the violent domestic homicide of elderly, infirm or disabled women by men”. Women are the majority of unpaid carers – 80 per cent, according to the King’s Fund. But, strangely, they appear much less likely than men to become “mercy killers”.
This discrepancy is impossible to separate from the wider belief in society that women are a kind of property owned by men. It is seen as a woman’s natural obligation to look after a man, but when a man has to look after a woman, it becomes an unreasonable imposition.
Hence the sympathy a man can draw on if he kills his wife while feeling overwhelmed by her needs. Mungall claimed to have seen an expression in his wife’s eyes “like an animal who needs to be put down and cannot say it” – a comparison that makes him the owner and her the pet.
Are we really supposed to believe that a man who feels that way about his wife is incapable of pressuring her into applying for a medically assisted suicide? In response to concerns from critics of the bill about this possibility, supporters of the bill have pointed to what they regard as its extensive safeguards. Simon Opher MP, a former GP and a member of the bill committee, has even said it is “judging doctors harshly to say that they will not spot coercion”.
Personally, I find Opher’s statement less reassuring and more indicative of a disturbingly blasé attitude to the possibility of abuse. In the limited window of a consultation, it is all too easy for a doctor to miss the signs. A YouGov survey for the charity SafeLives found that half of healthcare professionals felt unable to identify domestic violence. Sometimes, the doctor in question might even be actively untrustworthy: think of Harold Shipman, whose victims were predominantly elderly women.
The more common scenario, though, is the patient who, through lengthy cruelty and coercion from a partner or carer, becomes genuinely convinced that she (or sometimes he) is a burden who would be better off dead. Such a person may even refuse treatment, causing a curable disease to become terminal and placing them within the purview of the bill.
Legislators should be profoundly alert to this danger. Left unaddressed, it could place the state in the grotesque position of becoming a lawful accomplice to abusers. Yet unaddressed it remains. Of the nearly 50 individuals who gave oral evidence to the Public Bill Committee, not one was an expert in male violence or coercive control. (Jane Monckton Smith, an academic who studies femicide, was called but unable to attend; the committee did not attempt to find a substitute for her.)
From the start, the Terminally Ill Adults Bill has been a rush job – in the words of one former Labour adviser, “a quick-and-dirty policy development process that wouldn’t be close to good enough for 99 per cent of the laws made on our behalf”. If it becomes law, Labour risks turning the healthcare system into an executioner for those most in need of protection.
[See also: Rewriting the story of Gisèle Pelicot]
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