Latest news with #Rantzen
The Guardian
28-03-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Esther Rantzen's life-preserving cancer drugs no longer working, says daughter
The life-preserving cancer drugs that Dame Esther Rantzen was placed on last year are no longer working, her daughter has said. The health of the terminally ill Childline founder and journalist has deteriorated to the extent that she is no longer well enough to travel to a Swiss clinic, meaning that Dignitas is 'out of the window' for the 84-year-old, she said. Rebecca Wilcox told 5 News: 'Frankly, Dignitas is out of the window for us as well. You have to be relatively healthy to do that. If she had gone, she would have gone months before she would have died here.' Rantzen, a longtime supporter of assisted dying, was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer in 2023. She was thought to have just weeks to live, but last year started using a 'wonder drug' that helped her survive against the odds. When asked if her mother was 'still improving', Wilcox said: 'I really wish that was true, but I don't think that's the case any more.' News of Rantzen's deteriorating health comes in the same week that the assisted dying bill was pushed back until 2029, creating a delay that supportive MPs fear could mean the change of law is never realised. In November last year, the television personality told MPs 'my time is running out', but the issue was one 'the public care desperately about', and said it might not be debated by MPs 'for another decade' if the legislation did not pass. Responding to the bill's delay, Wilcox said: 'I just wish that people understood that all the assisted dying bill is, is choice for people that want it. 'All it is, is giving you peace of mind and that peace of mind, I cannot tell you how powerful that would be right now for my mum.' She said she had watched her mother suffer 'trauma' over the uncertainty of her deteriorating health. 'The fact that she doesn't know how her death is going to happen, how the pain is going to progress, the exhaustion, the fatigue, what symptoms are going to come in,' she said. 'She is a person who has fought her whole life for other people, and she has no control now. Why can't we give people like my mum with a terminal diagnosis, with no other choice, some choice as to when and how and where they die?' Earlier this week Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP piloting the assisted dying bill through parliament, proposed the delay, meaning the initial timeline of two years for implementing the law will now stretch to four. The delay marks the latest major change to the assisted dying proposals, which have proven contentious in the Commons and beyond. A spokesperson for Leadbeater said she 'hopes and believes the service can be delivered more quickly', but that the changes made to the bill since last autumn meant it would 'inevitably take longer to implement'. On Tuesday, the Isle of Man's parliament approved a bill to legalise assisted dying, making it the first place in the British Isles to introduce the change.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Esther Rantzen is defying the odds – and undermining the assisted suicide campaign
In January 2023, television presenter Dame Esther Rantzen was diagnosed with lung cancer. By May, her cancer had reached stage 4, and by the end of that year she had joined Dignitas. The next year, she extracted a promise from Sir Keir Starmer that he would allow time for an assisted suicide Bill to be debated in Parliament. Like many cancer patients, Dame Esther did not expect to survive very long. In 2023, she told a journalist that: 'I thought I'd fall off my perch within a couple of months, if not weeks. I certainly didn't think I'd make my birthday in June, which I did, and I definitely didn't think I'd make this Christmas'. Certainly she had reason to think her time on earth was short: the average life expectancy for stage 4 lung cancer is one year. Yet she is still with us today, more than two years after her diagnosis, thanks to Osimertinib, a decade-old 'wonder drug' which inhibits the growth of her cancer. As she wrote last Christmas, despite the constraints imposed by her condition, 'my own life is still worth living and enjoyable'. If enacted, Kim Leadbeater's Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which Rantzen has been assiduously promoting since its introduction late last year, will deprive many of the additional time she has enjoyed thanks to modern medicine. This is because the Leadbeater Bill would make assisted suicide available to patients whose death, as a result of a terminal illness, 'can reasonably be expected within 6 months'. But as Rantzen's own case shows, to predict how long a patient has to live is a notoriously difficult – if not impossible – task. According to a 2017 study, doctors' predictions that their patient was likely to die in 6 to 12 months were wrong 54 per cent of the time; their prognoses were less accurate than a coin toss. All the Leadbeater Bill requires is that doctors should believe in their own assessment of a patient's life expectancy. This is despite the evident unreliability of such predictions. Moreover, if they are wrong and the patient undergoes assisted suicide as a consequence, there are no recourses – if the patient is dead it will obviously be impossible to ever know if the doctors' assessments were right or not. Even more worryingly, experts have warned that the Leadbeater Bill would allow those who suffer from severe eating disorders to be eligible for assisted suicide; they can claim it because refusing food and water would bring down their life expectancy. Amendments introduced by MPs to prevent this dire possibility have been rejected by the pro-assisted suicide majority on the parliamentary committee in charge of the Leadbeater Bill. How many wrongful deaths are we prepared to tolerate as a society? In the case of capital punishment, society's answer has been 'one is too many'. But the Leadbeater Bill's promoters seem to be willing to tolerate a great many such deaths. According to the MP, Jack Abbott, who supports the Bill: 'there is no safeguard that we could possibly put in... that would 100 per cent make sure that there will never ever be any mistakes'. His colleagues must decide whether this is a morally acceptable answer. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
19-03-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Esther Rantzen is defying the odds – and undermining the assisted suicide campaign
In January 2023, television presenter Dame Esther Rantzen was diagnosed with lung cancer. By May, her cancer had reached stage 4, and by the end of that year she had joined Dignitas. The next year, she extracted a promise from Sir Keir Starmer that he would allow time for an assisted suicide Bill to be debated in Parliament. Like many cancer patients, Dame Esther did not expect to survive very long. In 2023, she told a journalist that: 'I thought I'd fall off my perch within a couple of months, if not weeks. I certainly didn't think I'd make my birthday in June, which I did, and I definitely didn't think I'd make this Christmas'. Certainly she had reason to think her time on earth was short: the average life expectancy for stage 4 lung cancer is one year. Yet she is still with us today, more than two years after her diagnosis, thanks to Osimertinib, a decade-old 'wonder drug' which inhibits the growth of her cancer. As she wrote last Christmas, despite the constraints imposed by her condition, 'my own life is still worth living and enjoyable'. If enacted, Kim Leadbeater's Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which Rantzen has been assiduously promoting since its introduction late last year, will deprive many of the additional time she has enjoyed thanks to modern medicine. This is because the Leadbeater Bill would make assisted suicide available to patients whose death, as a result of a terminal illness, 'can reasonably be expected within 6 months'. But as Rantzen's own case shows, to predict how long a patient has to live is a notoriously difficult – if not impossible – task. According to a 2017 study, doctors' predictions that their patient was likely to die in 6 to 12 months were wrong 54 per cent of the time; their prognoses were less accurate than a coin toss. All the Leadbeater Bill requires is that doctors should believe in their own assessment of a patient's life expectancy. This is despite the evident unreliability of such predictions. Moreover, if they are wrong and the patient undergoes assisted suicide as a consequence, there are no recourses – if the patient is dead it will obviously be impossible to ever know if the doctors' assessments were right or not. Even more worryingly, experts have warned that the Leadbeater Bill would allow those who suffer from severe eating disorders to be eligible for assisted suicide; they can claim it because refusing food and water would bring down their life expectancy. Amendments introduced by MPs to prevent this dire possibility have been rejected by the pro-assisted suicide majority on the parliamentary committee in charge of the Leadbeater Bill. How many wrongful deaths are we prepared to tolerate as a society? In the case of capital punishment, society's answer has been 'one is too many'. But the Leadbeater Bill's promoters seem to be willing to tolerate a great many such deaths. According to the MP, Jack Abbott, who supports the Bill: 'there is no safeguard that we could possibly put in... that would 100 per cent make sure that there will never ever be any mistakes'. His colleagues must decide whether this is a morally acceptable answer.
