Canadian Doctors Are Choosing Death. We Should Choose Life

“Don’t eat anything. Don’t drink anything.” Lizz Carr, the British actress-turned-activist, jokingly warned her companion against accepting treats from strangers as they made their way toward the office of Ellen Wiebe, a Canadian abortionist and self-described euthanasia provider. Carr was interviewing Wiebe for her 2024 BBC documentary, Better off Dead?; clips from their conversation soon went viral. 

Better Off Dead? is refreshingly funny. Carr wants you to laugh at euthanasia—to see it as an absurdist solution to life’s troubles. Together with Carr’s 2015 satirical play, Assisted Suicide: The Musical, it seems to have had some effect in the United Kingdom; on September 11, the House of Commons voted down the latest in a series of bills that would have legalized assisted suicide in that country.

Carr might seem an unlikely crusader against euthanasia. In the film, she describes herself as non-religious and appears comfortably to the left, politically. She employs arguments familiar to progressives, emphasizing societal failures to support disabled people like her. Together with Lisa Hammond—a fellow actress and wheelchair user—Carr grumbles that TV shows or films often depict disabled characters with extreme mawkishness. Carr is wry and stoic and makes it easy to forget that she has had a rare autoimmune disorder since childhood. She only occasionally acknowledges her hardships; in one scene, her mother notes that, at the age of twelve, Carr wished her life would end. Carr describes euthanasia as “a permanent sword of Damocles” hovering over her dark moments, “when you’re having a rubbish time.” The law should protect all people, she argues, “even from ourselves.”