There are limits to how much you can infer from the 540 British people who have elected to die with the help of Dignitas since it opened in 1998: it’s hard to tell how many more people would make this choice if they had £10,000, which is how much it typically costs.
But one figure, which came out in this week’s House of Commons’ assisted dying investigation, tells its own story: Britons constitute more than one in seven of the people who end their lives in this way; roughly the same proportion are French; in the majority by far are Germans, at 40%. The German government overhauled the laws on assisted dying in 2020, and the French are in the process of doing so, recognition of a fact so obvious that it is astonishing anyone should have to say it out loud: most people don’t even want to go to a hospital to die, let alone travel to another country.
