The Right to Die – The New York Times

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Our species is conditioned for survival and our societies are organized to govern how we live and to facilitate how we can all live well together.

Our medical system, our vaccines and the global response to the pandemic are built around the same instinct to protect and prolong individual lives. So it can feel jarring, and counterintuitive, to ask: What obligation does the government have in ensuring an individuals right to die?

Around the world, people facing a loss of autonomy, dignity and quality of life have the opportunity to set the date of their own deaths through voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide. But this choice is only legally available in a few countries, including Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada and Colombia.

Additionally, only a handful of American states allow doctors to help patients who meet well-defined criteria and are on the threshold of dying choose when and how to end their lives. The laws are modeled after the first Death With Dignity Act, passed in Oregon in 1997.

Catholic organizations, anti-abortion advocates and some disability groups continue to oppose aid in dying. The California Catholic Conference, the churchs public policy organization, for example, argued in June that liberalizing the states law puts patients at risk of abuse and the early and unwillful termination of life.

But polls regularly show broad public support for euthanasia. In 2020, Gallup found that 74 percent of respondents agreed that doctors should be allowed to end patients lives by some painless means if they and their families request it.

This week, we told the story of Marieke Vervoort, a Paralympic medalist from Belgium who chose when and how she would die. In doing so, we hoped to reveal the personal implications of a highly personal debate. Below, we share a note from Lynsey Addario, the photographer who spent almost three years reporting on Vervoort.

I have been a conflict and humanitarian photographer for 20 years, which means I have met people at their most vulnerable moments. Somehow I have to photograph them in ways that are compelling to viewers, but sensitive to the subjects.

The moments I capture exist forever as photographs, and the publication of this trauma has an effect on the subjects and on their loved ones and their feelings about me, the photographer. I dont often spend more than a few hours, days or weeks with someone I am shooting, and I rarely get the opportunity to see the person again once the assignment is complete.

But with Marieke, an initial three-day assignment turned into a three-year friendship, one in which I continuously struggled with my role as an objective observer, especially as I grew to love and admire a friend who was choosing to die according to her own timeline.

Marieke had this unique ability to love the people in her life as passionately as she pined for her death whenever her pain seemed to take over her life. She believed that the public needed to see and feel her pain in order to understand the importance of ones right to euthanasia to choose exactly when and how she would end her life. Marieke was uniquely articulate and honest about the complexities of how and why she believed in her right to die on her own terms, and she wanted me to tell that story. In the process, she asked and allowed me to photograph moments that made her loved ones uncomfortable.

I will always be conflicted about whether I should have deferred to her wishes or her parents wishes in her final moments and in her death. I got to know her parents over the years, and as a mother of two children, I couldnt fathom how they had the strength, generosity and courage to let their daughter go.

What I will remember about Marieke are the details I couldnt capture with images alone. So much about Marieke was in her laughter and her tears, her jokes and her pain things that are difficult to convey in a still image. A lot of our time together was spent joking around, until she would disappear into fits of pain so powerful she had seizures, and she would fall into unconsciousness for hours sometimes days.

I wanted to share our audio interviews and voice messages to tell a more complete, more nuanced version of Mariekes journey in a way still photographs simply cannot.

This podcast is unusual in a number of ways it aired more than two years after her death, and unlike most Times stories, it isnt pegged to a specific news event. But I believe Mariekes unflinching honesty offers incredible insight into the process of euthanasia something she trusted me to convey. She wanted this to be published and I wanted to do right by her wishes. I also hoped it would provide insight into how photojournalists work, what we have to do in order to properly convey the intimate human stories we have the privilege to witness.

We have a new show coming out. Its about a mysterious letter, detailing a supposed Islamist plot to take over schools, that shocked Britain in 2014. The scandal resulted in new national policies, multiple investigations, banned educators and revamped schools. But despite all of the chaos the letter caused, it remained strangely unclear who wrote it.

When Brian Reed, of the hit podcast S-Town, and Hamza Syed, a doctor-turned-reporter from Birmingham, England, tried to uncover the authors identity, the investigation became bigger than they ever imagined. From Serial Productions and The New York Times comes The Trojan Horse Affair, a mystery told in eight parts. You can listen to the trailer now and the entire show will be out next Thursday, Feb. 3.

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The Right to Die - The New York Times