In Depth:  assisted suicide

Nicola Laver

The assisted suicide bill is becoming mired in confusion and growing fears as days of parliamentary scrutiny unfold, with Kim Leadbeater MP appearing muddled about her own proposals.

Leadbeater said from the start that her proposals for assisted dying will be “the safest in the world”. But days of debate at committee stage have prompted growing alarm that it could allow the terminally ill to choose to die because they feel a burden on their loved ones – financially or otherwise.

Nicola Laver

'The more the [assisted suicide] bill is scrutinised, the more obvious it becomes how dangerous it is for the most vulnerable in our society’, the Christian Institute (CI) has said.

Just four days after the CI’s warning, it was reported in The Times that some MPs who initially backed the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill are wavering because of the removal of what was considered a key safeguard. On 11 February, Kim Leadbetter who sponsored the bill, said the requirement for High Court judge to rubberstamp a patient’s decision to end their life would be dropped.

Nicola Laver

Kim Leadbeater, the MP behind the new and controversial assisted suicide bill, has been criticised for deciding the first committee sitting would sit partly in private – and for producing a list of potential witnesses broadly supporting the bill.

The committee has already issued a call for written evidence. But when the committee met for the first time on 21 January, Leadbeater told members some of the sitting would be in private to respect ‘individuals’ privacy’.

Nicola Laver

‘The fight is not over,’ campaigners are insisting, as the assisted suicide bill which passed its first hurdle in Parliament now faces more detailed scrutiny.

And evangelicals are likely to be encouraged to write to the House of Commons committee examining the proposed legislation in detail once details of its membership emerge.

Nicola Laver

Pressure is mounting on parliamentarians to oppose the new assisted dying bill in England and Wales. The draft Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill introduced by Kim Leadbetter is to be debated on 29 November – with a free vote taking place on the same day.

A Labour minister has warned this will not give time for the 38-page document to be sufficiently scrutinised in Parliament. Treasury minister Darren Jones said, given this is a Private Member’s bill, it will not get ‘anywhere near the same level of scrutiny and debate as the bills put forward by the government – and legalising assisted dying is far from a straightforward issue’.

Nicola Laver

Laws allowing for assisted suicide in England and Wales look increasingly likely, with Parliament expected to have a free vote on the issue within weeks. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government says the Scottish Parliament lacks power to pass assisted dying legislation in its current form.

A Private Member’s bill introduced mid-October by Labour MP Kim Leadbetter is to be debated in November. Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill introduced in the Lords in July is also due to have its second reading.

Milla Ling-Davies

As the Parliamentary debate for assisted dying approaches, fears are growing that the hospice funding crisis could make patients more likely to opt to die.

Parliament is gearing up to debate proposals to give terminally ill people in England and Wales the right to choose to end their life later this year. At the same time, hospices, who receive only a third of their funding through the NHS, have been calling for more government support as they face job cuts, bed cuts and even closure.

Nicola Laver

Hospices in the UK are warning of severe underfunding, leading to fears that if ‘assisted dying’ is legalised, it would lead to more terminally ill patients requesting it.

In July, a Private Member’s bill on assisted dying was introduced in the Lords, and CARE has warned that a ‘right to die’ would become a ‘duty to die’. The bill was introduced by Lord Falconer, who has been campaigning for legalising assisted dying for more than a decade.

Evangelicals are awaiting the result of a House of Lords debate on assisted suicide scheduled for late October.

The bill aims to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales for terminally ill adults with six months or less left to live.

The latest attempt to liberalise the current law and introduce assisted suicide has been comprehensively defeated in the Commons on Friday 11 September.

The Assisted Dying Bill (No 2) was soundly rejected by MPs at Second Reading with 330 MPs voting against the legislation and 118 voting in favour.

On 14 July, disabled people descended on Westminster in droves to lobby MPs on Rob Marris’s Assisted Dying (no 2) Bill.

Marris seeks to give adults who are terminally ill and mentally competent the ‘right’ to have assistance to kill themselves using lethal drugs on the say-so of two doctors and one High Court judge. The Bill is due to have its second reading on 11 September.