What’s Next in the Fight Over Assisted Suicide in the UK?

What’s next in the fight over legalizing assisted suicide in the United Kingdom? The vote in favor of the bill in Parliament proposed by Labor Party MP Kim Leadbeater was 330-275, a relatively narrow outcome in that chamber. The bill has not yet been adopted by the House of Commons. It has gone to the committee stage where amendments can be authorized for consideration and changes can conceivably be made, though these are not typically extensive. Action will follow in the House of Lords after another reading and vote in the Commons. So, is the legalization of assisted suicide a done deal?

Dr. Calum Miller, a medical doctor and researcher in global abortion policy at the University of Oxford, believes that the probability of substantially altering or defeating the bill at this point is 15% or less. The bulk of the “yes” votes on the day after Thanksgiving were provided by the dominant Labour Party (234 votes) of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the Liberal Democrats (61 votes). The vote was not subject to party discipline but there was nonetheless some ideological polarization around this latest of social issues to preoccupy Western democracies.

The Conservative Party vote against assisted suicide was 92-23, meaning a uniform conservative opposition would have come close but still not have been enough to defeat the measure. The Conservative Party in the U.K. has frequently disappointed social conservatives, and the hope for a change of direction on assisted suicide was palpable, even though a number of leading figures in the party stepped up, including former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and Liz Truss. Reform Party leader and international media figure Nigel Farage voted against the bill as well, though his small party voted 3-2 overall in favor of the measure.

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Dr. Miller noted the missed opportunity for the Reform Party, which traces its roots to the fight over Brexit, which led to Britain’s decision by popular vote in 2016 to depart from the European Union. Reform’s rhetorical and issue stances track comfortably with the U.S. MAGA movement, but the party’s electoral success to date has been limited. As Miller writes, “I keep hearing from leading Conservative influencers that they were tempted to defect to Reform but their [Reform’s] majority support for euthanasia has put them right off — ‘they fell at the first hurdle.’”

One encouraging note is that the debate over the bill has not disappeared since the initial vote. The stakes are enormous, and fresh looks are being taken in the U.K. and other countries where the Pandora’s Box of government-approved suicide has been or may be opened. The U.K.’s near neighbors on the continent, particularly the Netherlands and Belgium, offer striking examples for British legislators and the public. Some sources state that both countries legalized aid in dying practices in 2002 and both insist their criteria for eligibility for the practice are strict.

Neither assertion is true. As attorney and international expert on euthanasia and other bioethics issues Wesley Smith has documented, the medical professions in these countries have moved the needle in a steadily more permissive direction for decades. The law did not lead but followed changes in medical standards. Now the reverse process may be in play.

In the case of the Netherlands, the progression began when a Dutch criminal court refused to impose a significant punishment on a physician who euthanized her mother in 1971, giving her only a one-week suspended sentence and a year’s probation. By degrees, the Netherlands has moved to more permissive policies. Today in the Netherlands, children aged 12 and over can be euthanized if they meet the law’s criteria for consent and experience “unbearable suffering, with no prospect for improvement.” Babies under age one can be euthanized as well with parental consent. In 2018, the BBC covered the story of 29-year-old Aurelia Brouwers, who died by assisted suicide citing the pain of unremitting mental illness. Aurelia otherwise had no physical life-threatening disease.

Belgium has traversed similar ground. The country’s first case of euthanasia of an adolescent, a terminally ill 17-year-old boy, was recorded in 2016. Belgium has no age threshold for these deeds, and moreover, it allows foreign nationals to come to its territory to be euthanized. A recent report in the U.K.’s Catholic Herald indicates that euthanasia now constitutes one in every 32 deaths in Belgium, a figure that is slowly but steadily rising. The Herald also reports that an estimated 21% of these deaths do not involve a person who is terminally ill.

Of possibly greater portent for the United Kingdom, stories about the growth of euthanasia and assisted suicide have taken on an even grimmer character as authorities promote it as an alternative to medical and social support. In these reports, elderly or disabled people, including military veterans, are having assisted suicide foisted upon them in lieu of obtaining health and social services under Canada’s socialized system. Like the U.K., advocates in Canada for what is called MAID, medical aid in dying, have repeatedly insisted that safeguards in the law would ensure that resort to the practice would be limited, with coercion detected and prevented, and informed consent in place.

The latest numbers according to the Canadian nonprofit research group Cardus tell a different story. On December 11, Cardus reported that national health statistics for 2023 show completed MAID cases continuing their rapid rise. Cardus previously reported a 13-fold increase in less than a decade, and that MAID is now tied with cerebrovascular disease as the fifth leading cause of death in Canada.

The potent mix of public budget stresses and inflation in Western nations, coupled with an array of threats to a shared understanding of the value of life, increases the danger of more such laws, and more liberal laws, being enacted around the globe. Assisted suicide has been introduced in France, where, France 24 reports, President Emmanuel Macron indicated the new law would be limited to adults with an incurable condition who are “expected to die in the ‘short or middle-term’ and who are suffering ‘intractable’ physical or psychological pain.” The lower house of the Irish Parliament voted earlier this year to approve a report recommending the legalization of assisted death in the country.

Opponents of the Leadbeater bill continue to point to this real-world history in Western Europe and North America, urging legislators to recognize the need for improvements in care for the very ill and the disabled, who may be more likely to succumb to the pressures of a society that readily labels some people as burdens on others. A poll released by Cicely Saunders International in October found that majorities of the public in England and Wales favor legalization of assisted suicide along the lines under consideration in Parliament, but that large majorities have deep concerns about vulnerable groups being pressured to choose to die and about the poor quality of palliative care available through the National Health Service. Prospects for addressing these concerns via amendments or additions to the Leadbeater bill are uncertain.

Apart from the historical and ethical connections among “value of life” issues there is a confluence of trends when it comes to implementation. Nations that debated legal abortion in rare cases or as medically necessary therapeutic measures decades ago now argue over untrammeled abortion late in pregnancy. What was described as exceptional is now routine. As Calum Miller points out, unlike the abortion issue, there remain strong secular organizations that oppose assisted suicide in the U.K. and are engaging in public information campaigns against the bill. The bill “passed by 330 votes to 275, which is a significant gap but not insuperable. We need 28 of those votes to change — or some abstainers to vote no — and 36 have already indicated that they voted to pass the bill only in order to allow for more debate. So it is an uphill battle but we do still have a chance!”

Dr. Miller also notes the challenges the NHS faces with funding, and provision of services might be exacerbated by the assisted suicide bill as practitioners like him, who will not refer patients or otherwise participate in promoting suicide, leave the practice of medicine. Meanwhile, advocates for life like CARE, which stands for Christian Action, Research and Education, are celebrating the news of a £100 million funding boost for hospices in England as well as £26 million in renewed funding for these services in 2025. CARE welcomed the news from the Government’s Department of Health and Social Care. CARE writes, “This form of support, not assisted suicide, is a compassionate and ethical way to support dying people.”

In this season of new birth, the nations of the Western world, where the value of individual human life was the focus of cultural and legal practice for centuries, face the age-old choice expressed in Deuteronomy, “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” Time is short, but the U.K., and our own country as well, can still choose the path of blessing.

LifeNews Note: Chuck Donovan is a 50-year veteran of the national debate over the right to life and served from 1981-89 as a writer in the Reagan White House.He is the former Executive Vice President of Family Research Council.