As an Anorexic, I’d have longed for assisted dying.

Rights & Freedoms

4 hours ago

Originally posted by: EPC

Source: EPC

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Britain is debating an assisted suicide bill sponsored by Kim Leadbeater (MP).

The Committee that is examining the assisted suicide bill is stacked with pro-assisted suicide members. The committee has debated multiple proposed amendments to the legislation and yet all of the amendments that would tighten the bill have been rejected.

An article by Hadley Freeman that was published in The Times on March 2, 2025 looks at the issue of assisted suicide for people with Anorexia. According to Freeman, Leadbeater rejected the proposal in this manner.

One suggested amendment that would have protected anorexics was that a person can’t qualify for assisted death because they have stopped eating and drinking; Leadbeater rejected that, referring to a woman with mouth cancer who had her tongue removed and starved to death. “We have to be careful not to dismiss those cases because they are real stories of real human beings,” she said.

In response Freeman tells her story and the story of a friend who struggled with anorexia.

Here’s another real story of a real human being. When I was 15, I made a new friend. Her name was Nikki Hughes and she was a talented artist, kind and funny. She was also anorexic, and we met because we were admitted to an eating disorders ward on the same day, and that, she said, bonded us for life. I don’t know what doctors made of Nikki, but I do know what they made of me, 15 and on my fifth hospital admission for anorexia. One told my mother to prepare for the very real chance that I would die. That sounded — to my nutrients-starved, illness-addled brain — great, because it confirmed I was good at anorexia.

Nikki was different. She talked about the art she would make when she recovered and would tell me off when she caught me hiding food. Two years later, when I was recovering and back at school, I opened the newspaper and there was a photo of Nikki: she had died. The hospital she was in at the time was told it could not “override her wishes” to starve herself to death and it would be assault if it tried to save her life with a feeding tube.

Freeman continues by explaining anorexia:

Anorexia is complicated: it’s a mental illness that leads to physical complications, which exacerbate the mental ones, and so on. Even more complicated, the more ill a person becomes, the more they resist treatment (eating, in other words) and the more they want to die. Offering an anorexic assisted death is like offering her liposuction: her desire for it is a symptom of her illness.

Right-to-die campaigners love to talk about autonomy, but such terms are meaningless when it comes to women whose minds are crazed by starvation. (Danny) Kruger pointed out last week that increasing numbers of anorexics are being classified as “terminal” in the NHS and given “palliative care”, which the Royal College of Psychiatrists has described as “troubling”.

Freeman further explains her concerns:

As Nikki and I learnt, it is impossible, even for doctors, to predict outcomes. The patient most determined to starve herself into the ether can recover. As my psychiatrist 30 years ago told me, there’s always hope.

Freeman explains that the assisted suicide bill excludes assisted suicide for people with mental illness but anorexia also leads to physical conditions. She writes:

Some believe that the bill excludes those with mental illness. In fact, it excludes those who are terminally ill “only” because of mental illness — anorexia can lead to physical problems, and these can qualify a person for assisted death. Others say only a tiny number of anorexia patients could qualify. But what number is acceptable? Anorexics are already gaining access to assisted death in Colorado, California and Oregon. One consultant said she could foresee a time when “20 to 30 patients with anorexia access assisted dying in this country every year, because of the contagion effect”.

Freeman states that amending the assisted suicide bill was necessary but there was a “religious fervour” in the committee room among “right-to-die” campaigners to push the bill through.

Freeman concludes her article by stating:

It is impossible for most people to comprehend the mind of an anorexic, which hisses that death is preferable to eating. Which is why it is unforgivable that MPs decided not to get hung up on those who do.