UK membership of Dignitas soars by 24% as assisted dying in Scotland moves closer

Robert Booth

Esther Rantzen, who has lung cancer, is one of the new members of Dignitas Photograph: David McHugh/Brighton Pictures/Shutterstock

UK membership of Dignitas, the Swiss assisted dying association, has jumped to 1,900 people – a 24% rise during 2023 – as an assisted dying bill is laid before the Scottish parliament.

People from the UK now make up the second largest group who have signed up to the organisation, which is based near Zurich and helps people take their own lives. The largest group is currently Germans, although they can now get help to end their lives at home after a 2020 court ruling.

Among the new British Dignitas members is TV presenter Esther Rantzen, who announced last December that she was joining. She has lung cancer and called for legalisation in the UK as she said: “I might buzz off to Zurich.”

Dignitas said the jump was partly the result of increasing press coverage and the ageing of the baby boomer generation which is “used to self-determination and making individual choices for their own life which of course includes the end of life”.

It also said that the UK “government and parliament have been dragging their feet for a long time and such people reach out to places where they feel [they are] being taken more seriously”. The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has said he will allow a free vote in the next parliament if he becomes prime minister.

The latest annual figures show that 40 people from the UK took their lives at Dignitas in 2023 – the highest level since 2019. It brings to 571 the number of Britons who have died with the help of Dignitas clinicians since its foundation in 1998, according to the organisation.

Helping someone end their own life remains a criminal offence in the UK, while it is legal in 10 US states, Canada, most of Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Austria, Ecuador, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Alistair Thompson, spokesperson for Care Not Killing, which campaigns against the legalisation of assisted dying, said that the surge in membership was partially caused by the widening view that the NHS was in crisis, that the hospice movement was financially struggling and that “we are still failing to ensure the availability of good quality palliative care”.

Opponents argue that legalisation could lead to vulnerable people being coerced to end their lives. But opinion polls consistently show about 70% of the public favours a law change limited to terminally ill adults and with strict controls. Paola Marra, 53, took her life last week at Dignitas after receiving a terminal bowel cancer diagnosis. Before she travelled alone to Switzerland from London, she told the Guardian: “I think it’s really unfair that I can’t do it here”.

Sarah Wootton, chief executive of Dignity in Dying, which campaigns in favour of legalisation, said: “It’s clear that under the blanket ban on assisted dying we are outsourcing compassion to Switzerland. Paola Marra, who so powerfully shared her story to help all those who come after her, was forced to die alone in a foreign country for fear of incriminating her loved ones.”

On Thursday a bill that would allow assisted dying for terminally ill adults in Scotland is due to be formally published. It will be scrutinised in committee before an initial vote by the devolved Holyrood parliament.

Helping someone take their own life in Scotland can currently be prosecuted as a crime. But if approved the new bill would allow, for the first time in the UK, terminally ill people to have help to take their own lives within the law. Moves are also afoot towards limited legalisation in Jersey and the Isle of Man.

Rantzen congratulated the Scottish parliament on tabling the bill and said: “The current law is cruel, complicated and causes terrible suffering to vulnerable people. I have received dozens of letters from people describing the agonising deaths of those they loved. This is literally a life and death issue, and I believe terminally ill patients like me need and deserve the right to choose this option if our lives become intolerable.”