By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist
Updated June 12, 2024, 3:00 a.m.
The most chilling detail in “Better Off Dead?” a new BBC documentary by the English actress and comedian Liz Carr (pictured here), is an automated telephone message: "For assistance in dying, please press 1."
Carr, who has been disabled since childhood and uses a wheelchair, made the film as Parliament debates whether to make it legal for doctors to help end the lives of people who are terminally ill and who say they wish to die. Similar legislation is being pushed in Massachusetts, where a bill permitting doctors to prescribe suicide drugs to patients with less than six months to live is now before the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
The film lasts just 58 minutes but it powerfully refutes the claim that authorizing medical professionals to facilitate the deaths of people with a fatal illness or disability is either enlightened or safe.