The long and complex road to assisted dying Premium

Deliberations made in Britain’s Parliament have shown us that making laws to govern assisted dying is a complicated affair

On November 29, 2024, while introducing the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill 2024-25 (The Assisted Dying Law) to the British House of Commons, the Member of Parliament, Kim Leadbeater told a rather distressing story of an “agonising death”.

A 47-year-old music teacher with a young son, Ms. Leadbeater said, had suffered from bile duct cancer which obstructed his bowel. On his last day, this saw him vomit faecal matter for five consecutive hours, before he choked and died. The vomiting was so violent that he could not be sedated and, what is worse, he had stayed conscious through the ordeal. All the while, his wife pleaded with doctors to help. But the physicians treating him were helpless. The look of horror on his face as he died, his family say, is something that will never leave them.

Ms. Leadbeater narrated the teacher’s case to illustrate the suffering that many others face from deadly illnesses, with no choice available to them to seek assistance in ending their pain. The draft law — which gives terminally-ill adults (in England and Wales), with less than six months to live, the right to die, once they have a request signed off by two doctors and a high court judge — was intensely debated. Eventually, the Bill was passed with a majority of 55 votes, with 330 members voting for it and 275 against.

In somewhat unusual circumstances, the Members of Parliament had been released from the tethers imposed on them by their party whips. They had been asked to decide as their conscience willed. As a result, what ensued was all manners of interesting voting patterns. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Conservative predecessor Rishi Sunak voted in favour. The Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, and the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, rejected the draft.

With its passing in the Commons, the proposal is now slated for review by a Public Bill Committee, which will scrutinise, fine tune, and suggest amendments to its various clauses, before it returns the draft to Parliament for an ultimate sanction. Therefore, there is still some way to go. But seeing how previous efforts, to bring about a law to allow assisted dying, have floundered, the Bill’s passing represents a milestone, a victory for those who consider the right to die, when faced with an intolerable ailment, as intrinsic to human liberty.

At the same time, the sharply divergent views expressed amongst lawmakers in Britain also shows us just how complex an issue this is. The debates contain in them lessons that the rest of the world can take, in deciding how best to allow people to both lead, and end, their lives, with dignity and compassion.

The opposition to the law primarily rests on two planks. First, opponents argue that the law is premised on a “slippery slope” — that it would be practically impossible to draw boundaries limiting the right to assisted death, and that the old and the disabled might be pressured into choosing to end their lives in the midst of fears that they might wind up becoming a burden on their loved ones.