Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
Liz Carr's Better off Dead? is available for you to watch on youtube (youtube link).
Anna Moore who wrote an article for the Guardian explains Better off Dead?
Better Off Dead? takes a deep dive into assisted dying and disability. Carr believes the two can’t be separated. It’s disturbing, of course, but also life-affirming and darkly funny, which isn’t surprising; Carr was a standup comic for years. In the opening shots, she and her disabled friends remember the times they have been told they would be better off dead. One, Jamie Hale, has even had someone offer to kill him. (“And this wasn’t someone I was particularly close to,” he says.)
The film is also intensely personal. Carr looks back at her childhood and the impact of having her life turned upside down by a rare autoimmune condition at seven. It’s something she has been reluctant to share in the past. “Our perception of disability is that it’s the greatest tragedy to befall you and I don’t want to compound that,” she says. “But I did want to show that I do know how your life changes so hugely when you join that camp – the most unsexy, unfun, unglamorous group. Who’d want that?”
One of the people that Carr interviews in her film was Dr Ellen Wiebe, Canada's most prolific euthanasia doctor.
Wiebe told Carr that nobody is more grateful than the patients that she has killed. Emira Tanatarova reported in the Daily Mail on May 15 on some of the comments from the BBC documentary viewers:
Enjoying her job a little too much I felt,' one wrote.
'She was extremely scary and oddly cheerful,' another added. 'But it might have been defensiveness which made her so very strange indeed.'
'Her eagerness and her excitement over grateful patients was unsettling,' one poster penned.
'Really eerie,' one comment read. 'Her job should bring feelings of solemnity, profoundness, sadness... anything but the weird euphoric state she seems to be in.'
Previous articles about Liz Carr:
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