Published November 29, 2024
Today, we will find out if there is a conservative party left in the United Kingdom. After only five hours of parliamentary debate, and without a single impact assessment, most Conservative MPs are set to vote against Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater’s rushed assisted suicide bill. Yet an eclectic minority of Tory MPs—supported by former Prime Minister David Cameron—are set to be the deciding factor to push Leadbeater’s bill across a critical vote this week.
If you squint, it is a bill with “safeguards and protections,” at least according to the preamble. In theory, Leadbeater’s bill will allow two physicians and a judge to prescribe a lethal concoction to adults with a terminal prognosis of under six months. It will prevent coercion, though it fails to specify how. It will ensure a rigorous oversight, because Leadbeater said so to The Guardian. It will be limited to mentally competent adults free of external pressure, never mind that Leadbeater also said that “being concerned about being a burden” is a “legitimate reason” to die under the bill.
Yet there is no time to ask these questions, or even to ask if the public is interested in Leadbeater’s modest proposal for legalizing suicides of the sickest or those most disabled. Besides the well-moneyed euthanasia lobby, it is unclear if there is any substantial constituency for this bill. According to Dying with Dignity’s own poll, only 43% of Britons want their MP to vote for the assisted suicide legislation, while another poll by an anti-euthanasia group found that just 11% support the bill when told of its specifics.
Public skepticism is an understatement. Given that judicial oversight would require an already stressed court system to oversee thousands of additional deaths, dozens of retired senior judges have warned that this bill will destroy the courts entirely. The two Labour cabinet ministers responsible for administering assisted suicide—the justice secretary and the health secretary—both oppose it, as do four former prime ministers. Even proponents of assisted suicide in principle, like Liberty, a human rights group, have rejected the proposed bill as badly conceived.
Then there are the physicians. Despite Leadbeater’s assertion that vulnerable patients—including those who are suicidal or those with anorexia nervosa—would not qualify, the chair and deputy chair of the faculty of eating disorders say her bill is unsafe and a direct threat to their patients’ lives. Louis Appleby, who leads the National Suicide Prevention Strategy, decried that if a bill that legalized some suicides passes, it will mean “we have lost something we may not get back.” In short, more than 350 disability rights organizations, the Association for Palliative Medicine, the British Geriatrics Association, the Chief Rabbi, and the Church of England all oppose the bill.
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Alexander Raikin is a Visiting Fellow in the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His research focuses on the dignity of human life and end-of-life issues, especially on its impact on the field of medicine and broader ethical questions of social belonging.
