With the assisted suicide Bill set to be voted on at the end of November, campaigners are already pushing to extend assisted suicide to people without terminal illnesses.
Earlier this week, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater tabled her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill and, while the details of the Bill have not yet been released, the Bill is expected to apply to people with less than six or twelve months left to live.
However, a leading campaign group and a number of high-profile individuals are not satisfied and are vocal about their wish to see the scope of the Bill widened.
On the same day that Leadbeater tabled her Bill, Humanists UK said that anyone “incurably suffering” should be able to access assistance in suicide.
At the same time, retired judge Sir Nicholas Mostyn, a long-time friend and podcast cohost of assisted suicide campaigner Lord Falconer, lamented the fact that Leadbeater’s Bill would not, in its current expected form, apply to people who were not terminally ill. Sir Nicholas, who has Parkinson’s disease and runs a podcast, Movers and Shakers, about the condition said “There is a cohort of people like us who it is not going to help and we are left with the existing, most unsatisfactory law”.
“Parkies will never get a terminal diagnosis, so this bill is no f***ing use to us at all”.
MPs calling for expansion of assisted suicide Bill
Former NHS England Medical Director Dr Graham Winyard is also calling for Leadbeater’s Bill to include “both the terminally ill and the incurably suffering”. Winyard complained that less than half of UK residents who ended their lives by assisted suicide in Switzerland in recent years would have been eligible for assisted suicide under Leadbeater’s Bill in its current expected form.
Mostyn’s comments come soon after it was revealed that, according to the Telegraph, a group of 54 cross-party MPs are believed to be campaigning for Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill to apply not only to people who are terminally ill, but also to those who are “incurably suffering”. These include “as many as 38 Labour” MPs, 13 of whom are in Government positions.
The news that these MPs were backing a more radical change in the law came shortly after Leadbeater insisted that her Bill will only apply to those with terminal illnesses.
Safeguards will not work”
Fears that the law will be expanded and become a threat to disabled and vulnerable people have been shared by opponents of the Bill. Actress and activist Liz Carr, who described the prospect of legalising assisted suicide in the UK as “terrifying” in her BBC documentary Better Off Dead?, shared her fears about its effect on vulnerable people.
She said “For many disabled people the assumption that we’d be ‘Better Off Dead’ is something that we get used to hearing. We do not believe that any safeguard can adequately protect us from coercion, abuse, mistake and discrimination. We believe that if assisted suicide is legalised, disabled, ill and older people risk being devalued to death”.
Baroness Ilora Finlay also expressed concerns about safeguards, saying “You will be told that watertight safeguards can be written into an assisted suicide bill. But how do we define terminal illness? Diagnoses can be wrong and prognoses are notoriously inaccurate. There should be no coercion, but who can really judge this?”.
In the annual assisted suicide report ‘Oregon Death with Dignity Act: 2023 Data Summary’, among the end-of-life concerns listed by those who ended their lives, almost half (43.3%) of those who ended their lives reported being concerned about being a “[b]urden on family, friends/caregivers”.
Spokesperson for Right To Life UK, Catherine Robinson, said “Alarm bells are rightly ringing at the prospect of this dangerous assisted suicide Bill. Even before the Bill received its First Reading earlier this week, prominent voices were calling for the scope of the Bill to be widened”.
“The UK should heed the warning signs. Residency requirements for assisted suicide in the state of Oregon were recently removed leading to concerns about ‘suicide tourism’, and the interpretation of terminal illness in Oregon has been broadened to include anorexia, arthritis, hernias and diabetes”.
“We are calling on the UK to resist this dark and sinister path and instead to choose life, putting resources into high-quality palliative care”.
