Compassion or Coercion? Britain’s Emotional Debate Over Assisted Dying.

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.