Ask your MP tostop Sarco suicide pods being launched in the UK

The inventor of the Sarco gas chamber assisted suicide pod, the founder of ‘Exit International’, Dr Philip Nitschke (whom the media nickname “Dr Death” and “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide”) has announced that he intends to launch an assisted suicide service using the Sarco pods in the UK if the Bill becomes law.

Leading legal academics have confirmed with The Telegraph that these horrifying assisted suicide pods will be legal under the proposed legislation, as the proposer of the Bill, Kim Leadbeater MP, has chosen to include a section that allows for assisted suicide to be completed using a “medical device”, which could include the Sarco pod.

A person can end their own life inside the 3D-printed Sarco pod by pushing a button, which injects nitrogen gas into the sealed gas chamber. The nitrogen causes them to suffocate to death. Dr Philip Nitschke has said that the machine can be “towed anywhere for the death”.

A mother-of-two was the first person to use the Sarco-assisted suicide pod in Switzerland earlier this year.

If the Leadbeater Bill becomes law, thousands of lives could be ended here in the UK using these horrifying suicide pods over the coming years.

The introduction of the Bill also comes at a time when many elderly people are heading into winter with their Winter Fuel Payment cut by the Government. Palliative care services are in crisis with over 100,000 people dying each year without receiving the palliative care they desperately need. Our wider healthcare system is in a state of crisis, with Labour’s own Health Secretary describing the NHS as “broken”.

Within this context, this proposed assisted suicide law is a disaster waiting to happen.

We only have to look overseas to countries that have legalised assisted suicide and/or euthanasia to see that in practice these laws have been a disaster.

The horror stories that are coming out of Canada are likely the ones that you are most familiar with. These include:

• army veterans with PTSD being offered ‘Medical Assistance In Dying’ (MAID) 
• patients citing poverty or housing uncertainty as their main reason for seeking to end their lives through ‘MAID’
• numbers spiralling out of control: in 2016 when ‘MAID’ was introduced, there were just over 1,000 cases but by 2022 this escalated to 13,241 deaths, accounting for 4.1% of all deaths in Canada.
• Canada is now on the verge of introducing euthanasia and assisted suicide for people with mental health conditions, with this change in the law coming into effect in 2027.

There is also truly shocking evidence coming out of other countries and jurisdictions that have introduced assisted suicide and/or euthanasia.

In Oregon, a state frequently held up by UK campaigners as a model for introducing assisted suicide here, eligibility criteria in the law has expanded via the interpretation of ‘terminal illness’ so that assisted deaths have been granted for anorexia, diabetes, hernias and arthritis.

Closer to home, in the Netherlands and Belgium, euthanasia laws and/or practice have been extended to allow euthanasia for children and newborn babies.

It is vital that this dangerous Bill does not become law.

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