THE debate on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill will continue on 20 June, after further parliamentary time was devoted to the proposed legislation on Friday.
Clauses that prohibited doctors from raising the topic of assisted dying with the under-18s, and banned advertisements for assisted-dying services, were added to the Bill during Friday’s debate.
On Friday, before the debate began, a new report was published that responded to accusations that opponents of assisted dying were not honest about their religious motivations (News, 13 June).
During the debate, the Labour MP for Rochdale, Paul Waugh, said: “I’m not driven by religion, but I don’t believe that those with religious faith should be denigrated or patronised as they have been.
“I’m driven instead by my duty as a legislator to get this Bill right, and by what I see as my moral duty to protect the most vulnerable in society,” he said.
Mr Waugh proposed an amendment to the anti-advertisement clause to tighten the exceptions allowed when, for instance, responding to a request for information about assisted dying. The amendment was rejected by 233 votes to 254.
The Bill’s sponsor, the Labour MP for Spen Valley, Kim Leadbeater, responding to suggestions that the focus should be on improving palliative care rather than legalising assisted dying, said: “This is not an either/or conversation. Palliative and end-of-life care can and do work side by side to give terminally ill patients the care and choice they deserve in their final days. . . It should also not be an either/or for us as legislators, to choose between supported assisted dying or other end of life options.”
The Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond Park, Sarah Olney, who opposes the Bill, said, however, that none of the safeguards “fully mitigate the risks to vulnerable groups”, and continued: “We are not thinking about the impact on our wider society of the concept of lives not being worth living and how that might disproportionally effect vulnerable groups.”
“I do not think that this Bill is safe,” said the Second Church Estates Commissioner, Marsha de Cordova, who is the Labour MP for Battersea. “I know I speak for tens of thousands of disabled people who say ‘We need assistance to live, and not to die.’”
The Labour MP for East Renfrewshire, Blair McDougall, said that he respected those who were influenced by their faith, though he was not one of them. Instead, the “big booming voice” echoing in his head was not that of God, but of Nye Bevan, who had warned against the corruption of care.
“I understand the attraction around choice,” he said, “but arguing for freedom of choice in isolation, without also acknowledging the economic, social, and cultural context people make those choices in, does not seem to me a Labour approach to this.”
MPs have a free vote on the legislation. Many of the most prominent voices in opposition to Ms Leadbeater’s Bill are other Labour MPs.
Many amendments and revised clauses were debated without being put to a vote.
Arguing against a proposal for a consultative board, with a special representative for people with minority-ethnic backgrounds, the Labour MP for Loughborough, Dr Jeevun Sandher, said that data from places where assisted dying had been legalised suggested that ethnic minorities were less likely to opt for an assisted death.
“The point of this Bill is to give people the choice to end their life regardless of the colour of their skin. There is no special quality of the colour of my skin that affects my access or the need for a special representative in this case,” he said.
An amendment to prevent health professionals’ being the first to raise the subject of assisted dying with a patient was was voted on, after being put forward by MPs who, in general, opposed the Bill as a whole. It was lost by 256-230, but another amendment, prohibiting a doctor from raising the possibility of assisted dying with an someone under the age of 18, was passed, by 259-216.
One of the main talking points was the legislative process, and there were complaints that the Bill had not been debated enough.
The Conservative MP for North Dorset, Simon Hoare, described the current version of the Bill as “skeletal.” “This is too serious an issue to have as many gaps and lacunas,” he said.
The Health and Social Care Minister, Stephen Kinnock, said, however, that the Bill had received more than 90 hours of parliamentary time: more than most pieces of proposed legislation.
An amendment supported by more than 60 MPs was moved by the Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, Adam Jogee. It would require that, if passed, the Bill would be subject to further scrutiny by the House of Commons before coming into force (the timeline for which is several years).
“It is this Bill that we are voting on today, not the principle,” he reminded MPs, though his amendment was also not put to the vote before time ran out on Friday.
While at times emotional, the debate was generally even-tempered — although the Liberal Democrat MP for South Devon, Caroline Voaden, objected to the use, by some members, of the terms “murder”, “killing”, and “suicide” to describe assisted dying.
“This is about people dying in a civilised way. . . To call is murder and killing is so wrong, and I think we have a duty to mind our language,” she said.
