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Better off dead? review: If you think assisted dying should be legal, watch this eloquent warning, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS


CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Better Off Dead? had no pretensions to being nuanced, balanced or open-minded.

These programmes always end by joining a terminally ill patient on a poignant one-way trip to Switzerland, an intrusion into some poor family's grief for the sake of our morbid curiosity. Everywhere she looked on telly, she said, in drama, sport or reality shows, disabled people were depicted either as 'charity cases' or 'inspiration porn — superhuman narratives like the Paralympics, or where you're in terrible pain and now you want to kill yourself'. She met people with opposing views but, because her opinions were immutable, there was little tension in the encounters — even when she flew to Canada to interview a doctor who routinely performs euthanasia.

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