The UK Just Legalised Death On Demand

As the Catholic Bishops of England have pointed out, there will be no need for hospices if the elderly and terminally ill can be murdered at will.

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

British MPs have narrowly voted in favour of assisted suicide. Politics has lost all sense of humanity.

The UK is fast becoming a death cult. Earlier this week, MPs voted to decriminalise abortion up until the point of birth. Now, we are one step closer to legalising state-sponsored dying in England and Wales. Today, MPs in the House of Commons voted for the second time on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, with 314 voting for and 291 voting against. The bill will still need to pass through the House of Lords, but will now almost certainly become law. 

This will legalise assisted suicide (or ‘assisted dying’, as it is often euphemistically called) for people nearing the end of their lives. In theory, any adult over the age of 18 who is mentally competent and has no longer than six months to live will be able to request that a doctor prescribe them lethal medication to end their own life. 

From the very beginning, the assisted-dying bill has been fraught with problems. For starters, legalising assisted suicide is something of a pet project for UK prime minister Keir Starmer—in fact, it is one of the few issues he has never flip-flopped on. As far back as 2010, when Starmer was director of public prosecutions, he took the decision to not prosecute in most cases of assisted suicide. He has previously said that he is “personally committed” to legalising the practice, and even promised terminally ill TV personality and assisted-dying campaigner Esther Rantzen that he would do everything in his power to push the law through parliament. 

As such, assisted suicide was a cause in search of a bill. Last October, he managed to convince the Labour MP for Spen Valley, Kim Leadbeater, to table the assisted-dying bill as a Private Member’s Bill. It passed the first round of voting at the Second Reading in November. 

Starmer’s desperation to push this law through has made it a messy, confusing, and downright dangerous piece of legislation. One of the main problems is the lack of safeguarding written into the rushed bill. During the run-up to the first vote, Leadbeater boasted of how ‘safe’ assisted dying would be (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Her safeguards would supposedly prevent vulnerable people from being coerced into taking their own lives and ensure that only those who were mentally sound and willing were helped to die. There would apparently be a robust vetting process, whereby any patient who wished to die would have to be signed off by a High Court judge. During the first vote in November, over 60 MPs specifically said that this safeguard was vital for them offering their support to the bill. In March, Leadbeater and the committee tasked with scrutinising the bill scrapped this measure. It was instead replaced with a vague three-person panel, made up of a social worker, psychologist, and “senior legal figure.”

The lack of meaningful safeguards leaves the assisted-dying bill wide open to abuse. There is no real way of determining that a patient is not being coerced into ending their lives. As it stands, the bill would allow for a proxy to sign away a terminally ill patient’s life due to “reason of physical impairment, being unable to read or for any other reason.” Anyone who does not see the endless opportunities for this to be exploited by an ill-meaning relative, family friend or carer is either naive or deluded.  

Then there is the issue of who will be allowed to die. Technically speaking, the bill would only allow terminally ill adults of sound mind to apply for the process. But various charities and organisations have warned that those with conditions such as multiple sclerosis, dementia, and even anorexia could fall within this category. Because severe eating disorders lead to life-limiting physical symptoms, it becomes difficult to exclude these patients from being eligible. A doctor may well declare them to be suffering from treatment-resistant or ‘terminal’ anorexia and give them a life expectancy of less than six months. Internationally, at least 60 people suffering from eating disorders have undergone assisted deaths since 2012. 

Even if these loopholes are eventually closed, it is almost certain that the UK law will continue to expand in the same way it has in places where assisted dying is already legal. In the Netherlands, where the practice has been allowed since 2002, the eligibility criteria now encompasses physically healthy, but mentally unwell adults. Last year, at 33 years old, Jolanda Fun ended her own life with the help of doctors, after a decades-long battle with depression, eating disorders, and mild learning difficulties. A month later, 28-year-old Zoraya ter Beek chose to die after doctors told her that her depression was incurable. Both were otherwise physically fit and healthy young adults. 

Meanwhile in Canada, which legalised assisted dying in 2016, we routinely see tragic cases of the elderly, poor, and mentally unwell taking advantage of the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) programme to escape their dire living conditions. One man, 54-year-old Amir Farsoud, applied for MAID in 2022 because he was about to be made homeless. Farsoud explained publicly that he didn’t actually want to die, but felt that he had run out of options. Fortunately, he didn’t go through with it and was able to find somewhere to live with the help of public donations. But under MAID, his death would have been perfectly legal on the grounds of his chronic back pain. As of 2027, Canada is also set to introduce assisted deaths for people suffering from kmental-health issues alone, which is bound to open the floodgates for more unnecessary deaths.

Now MPs have voted to take us closer to following in these dystopian footsteps. If there is one heartening thing that has come out of today’s vote, it is that the majority has more than halved since the November vote—from 55 to just 23 votes. This is at least a sign that MPs are waking up to what a monumental disaster this law would be. 

Whenever the state starts to decide whose lives are and are not worth living, we enter dangerous territory. Campaigners might argue that this law is about ‘compassion’ and ‘dignity’, but it is anything but. In reality, assisted suicide is the medicalisation of despair. There is nothing kind or progressive about a society that tells its most fragile members that they are a burden that must be quietly disposed of. 

Instead of investing in palliative care, community support, or better mental-health treatments, we are effectively telling the elderly and unwell that they are not worth keeping alive. Their existences are simply too complicated, expensive and burdensome to matter to a government that is obsessed with bureaucracy and managerialism. Treating death as healthcare should horrify us all. Every MP who voted for this callous law ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Pictured: Kim Leadbeater, MBE, MP who introduced the murder bill