Sarah Tarlow had a sense that something was wrong as soon as she opened her front door and called out to her bedridden husband upstairs. There was no reply. Instead of the sound of the radio that normally echoed from his room, the house was engulfed in silence.
Unable to move his legs, incontinent, his eyesight failing, without any sense of taste or smell, her partner of more than two decades, Mark Pluciennik, had taken a lethal drug overdose.
Because it is illegal in Britain to help someone die by suicide, Mr. Pluciennik, who suffered from an undiagnosed neurological illness, chose one of his wife’s rare absences, in May 2016, to take his own life, protecting Ms. Tarlow from possible prosecution.
But that meant dying completely alone.
“I think it was enormously brave what he did. I’m not sure I could be that brave,” Ms. Tarlow, a professor of historical archaeology at Leicester University, said while sipping coffee at her home in a snow-covered village 30 miles from Leicester, in England’s Midlands. “I think it was a courageous thing, I think it was a loving thing.”
Even Britons who go abroad to die — for example to Switzerland, where the law is more permissive — must do so alone to protect their families. With growing awareness of such cases, British lawmakers are on Friday scheduled to vote on whether to permit assisted dying in limited circumstances.
The proposed bill, introduced by a Labour lawmaker, Kim Leadbeater, would impose strict conditions — too restrictive to cover Mr. Pluciennik’s case. The only people eligible would be those aged 18 or over in England or Wales who have received a terminal diagnosis and been told they have no more than six months to live. Lethal drugs would have to be self-administered, and two doctors and a judge would have to approve the decision.
Still, this would be a landmark piece of legislation in England and Wales, where the law treated attempted suicide as a crime until 1961. (Different laws apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland.)
Some compare the change to the legalization of abortion in 1967 and the abolition of the death penalty in 1969. Assisted dying is legal in a handful of European countries, Canada and New Zealand, and in 10 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
The Labour government is remaining neutral on the issue, with lawmakers given the freedom to vote as they wish, making it impossible to predict the outcome.
While many senior ministers are expected to support the measure, two of the most prominent — the health secretary, Wes Streeting, and justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood — are opposed. Mr. Streeting said that the country’s creaking national health service would incur new costs if it had to train staff to deal with assisted dying. He also believes that palliative care in Britain is not good enough, meaning that some may feel they have no practical alternative but to end their lives prematurely.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has not said how he will cast his ballot but when the issue was last debated in 2015, he voted in favor. Lawmakers rejected the policy then by 330 votes to 118.
A clear majority of Britons support the principle of assisted dying, with 65 percent in favor and 13 percent opposed, according to one survey. But that support is “absolutely contingent” on strong safeguards, said Luke Tryl, U.K. director of More in Common, the research organization that conducted the poll. For voters, the most important protection was “proof that someone isn’t being pressured,” he said.
Faith leaders have spoken out against the proposed changes and opponents worry the legislation could lead to Britons being coerced into ending their lives or doing so out of guilt at the physical or financial burden their care places on relatives.
“I honestly believe the pressure of self-coercion is the risk here,” said Liz Carr, an actor and disability rights campaigner. Some people, she said, might think, “‘My family is having to look after me, I’m incontinent, I don’t want to use all the money I have saved over the years on care, it would be better for those who love me not to see me like this, I will do the honorable thing.’”
Ms. Carr, who is best known in Britain for her role in a BBC crime drama, “Silent Witness,” has been ill since age seven with a rare condition, and has used a wheelchair from the age of 11. She fears that if the law is adopted, its scope will be increased and that it will pose a risk to those with complex medical conditions.
“Once you cross that line and even vote yes to considering it, everything changes because ending your life medically becomes a possibility,” she said.
Ms Carr, who recently made a BBC documentary on the issue called “Better Off Dead?”, believes that many doctors and judges — who would make key decisions — share a widespread, unconscious social bias against older or disabled people, valuing their lives less than those of others.
Patients with complex medical needs might be more likely to agree to end their lives at difficult points, Ms. Carr added, recounting how she recently sat in a room with around a dozen disabled people, each of whom had wanted to die at some point.
“Sometimes we need to be held back, and we need to be told ‘No,’ and we need support rather than the belief that we would be better off dead,” she said.
She fears the legislation would push in the opposite direction. “The fact that a law exists that would easily help you end your life — at your deepest, darkest time — that is what terrifies me and so many disabled people because it feels like a permanent sword of Damocles hanging over us.”
But Ms. Tarlow, who supports the bill, thinks it is too restrictive in only applying to those judged to have six months to live. “I don’t see the rationale, personally, in having to have the terminal prognosis; I don’t see why it’s OK to curtail a short period of suffering but not a long one,” said Ms. Tarlow, who has written a memoir called The Archaeology of Loss.
“I think it would be a compassionate act to vote for the bill because I think it is cruel to make people die horrible, prolonged deaths against their will and that’s what the present situation currently does,” she said.
Her husband, who was also an archaeology academic, endured five years with his condition deteriorating before his death aged 62.
Despite Mr. Pluciennik’s careful planning (he left two letters), Ms. Tarlow was questioned after his death by the police, who seized medication as well as her husband’s phone and laptop.
It transpired that she must have handed him the package containing the pentobarbital he bought illegally on the internet to end his life. Ms. Tarlow did not open his mail and thinks that the parcel arrived shortly before one of their three children’s birthdays, so she assumed it contained a present. Nonetheless the police talked to her as though she might be a criminal, she said.
But her main argument is that people are already taking their lives, either by going abroad or by subterfuge. So, on Friday — the day after her late husband’s birthday — Ms. Tarlow plans to stand outside Parliament to demonstrate in favor of assisted dying.
“Mark was absolutely isolated and was absolutely on his own,” she said. “I still get upset and angry that he had to die on his own when I should have been there.”
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