In the press
Coverage
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Assisted dying bill a matter of life and death for vulnerable women (opens in a new tab)
Makes the gendered case against the Bill: that abused, disabled and vulnerable women — already made to feel a burden by the people who control them — will be coerced into dying early.
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The Assisted Dying Bill raised more questions than it answered. These haven’t gone away. (opens in a new tab)
Berger argues the Bill ran out of parliamentary time with its central problems unresolved — safeguards that do not test for coercion or capacity. She notes the objections came from disabled people, palliative care clinicians and safeguarding experts rather than religious peers, and that the answer is to fix unequal end-of-life care rather than re-run the same Bill.
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Assisted dying laws need to be watertight before they are made law, poll says (opens in a new tab)
Reports the JL Partners polling this campaign cites: 77% say a measure that has not been fully scrutinised should not be enacted, 68% think it important to prevent people being coerced or pressured into ending their lives, and 94% did not place assisted dying in their top three priorities. Labour peer Lord Rees is quoted saying the Bill "lacks crucial protections for the most vulnerable in our society and poses a real risk to our NHS".
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Wales must not be railroaded into accepting the assisted dying bill (opens in a new tab)
Jones argues Wales is being pulled into a law its own Senedd rejected by 26 votes to 19, which cuts against the devolution settlement. She also questions whether the NHS in Wales is ready, citing workforce shortages and the risk of funding being diverted from palliative care, and objects to a change of this scale passing as a Private Member’s Bill.
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‘We all want to have a good death’ — but assisted suicide is not the solution (opens in a new tab)
Hillier argues the risks are great whatever the intentions of its advocates. Eligibility has widened wherever assisted dying has been legalised — one in twenty deaths in Canada is now euthanasia, many for social reasons — a six-month prognosis cannot be reliably predicted, and the lethal drugs themselves have never been properly evaluated. She cites Tanni Grey-Thompson on the value judgment that some people are “better off dead”, and concludes that where support is missing the answer is world-class palliative care rather than lethal drugs — as she notes Wes Streeting has himself conceded.
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Assisted dying is not progressive — we need to stand up for the vulnerable (opens in a new tab)
Asato argues the Bill is not the progressive measure it is taken for: drawing on years working in a domestic abuse charity, she writes that coercion is “not a risk with this legislation – it is a certainty”, and that there is nothing progressive about giving perpetrators of domestic abuse a new way to kill their victims. She calls ‘choice’ a fallacy for a suicidal person, an older abuse victim or a grandparent watching care fees swallow the family’s savings, and says supporting the Bill means treating those who die wrongfully as collateral damage.
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As a doctor, I say this: before we even consider assisted dying, fix how we care for the most vulnerable (opens in a new tab)
Ahmed, a transplant surgeon as well as an MP, argues that real compassion means asking the prior question: what kind of society legislates for assisted dying before it has fixed the care system people actually die in. He warns the Bill has been mis-sold, since a medicalised death is still a process that carries risks of complication and cannot promise the certainty patients imagine, and notes that the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and others have raised concerns. A wish to die, he writes, is shaped by whether people feel supported, whether they fear becoming a burden, and whether the care they need is there at all.
In their own words
Labour MPs on why this Bill isn’t safe
These are Labour MPs speaking in the House of Commons about the Bill they were asked to pass — on the safeguards it doesn’t have, the people it puts at risk, and the way it has been made.
The footage is captioned throughout, so it can be watched with the sound off.
Can’t play the video? Download it as MP4.