Draft assisted dying laws will feature the “strictest protections” against coercion anywhere in the world, the MP who tabled the proposed legislation at Westminster has promised, with the Bill potentially running to more than 40 pages.
Kim Leadbeater has warned the existing policy leads to people with a settled wish to die having to travel abroad to end their lives.
However, the Labour MP for Spen Valley in West Yorkshire who tabled the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, also said if MPs pass a new law it “must be a good law”.
The wording of the legislation is due to be published early this week, and Ms Leadbeater’s Bill is due for its first debate in the House of Commons on November 29.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting voiced his fears about coercion when he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain last month he worries “about those people who think they’ve almost got a duty to die to relieve the burden on their loved ones”, and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby told the BBC assisted dying “has led to a slippery slope” elsewhere in the world.
Writing in The House magazine, Ms Leadbeater said her proposal “offers hope to those terminally ill people with a clear, informed and settled wish to have a better death, while at the same time protecting all those approaching the end of their life from coercion or pressure to make a decision that isn’t right for them; indeed my Bill will contain the strictest protections and safeguards of any legislation anywhere in the world”.
She added: “I have been consulting very widely over the past few weeks, mainly because I’m not the sort of person who would embark on a task like this without delving deeply into the issue first.
“But also because I am clear that if we are to have a new law it must be a good law.”
Ms Leadbeater unveiled her proposal to legalise assisted dying using a private member’s bill, after a ballot for House of Commons debating time earlier this year.
She said she had spoken with medical professionals, lawyers, faith leaders, disability rights campaigners, palliative care professionals and “families who have first-hand experience of the terrible pain and trauma that results from the current law and terminally ill people who know what awaits them and simply want the right to choose to die on their own terms”.
The MP continued: “I was particularly moved by those whose loved ones faced an unbearably painful end despite having had access to the best possible palliative care. Above all, it is their voices we should be listening to in the coming days and weeks.”
The existing policy “leads to desperate people travelling abroad, if they can afford it, or taking things into their own hands, often long before they need to and alone, because they are scared to put those close to them at risk of prosecution”, Ms Leadbeater said.
The Bill has support from the Dignity in Dying campaign group, which published a letter to MPs from seven current and former nurses urging them to support the proposal.
“We are joined by a single wish – all of us want choice,” the group, which includes two palliative care nurses, wrote.
“For most, palliative care in hospice, hospital or at home will help them have the death that they want.
“But we feel we have to speak up for those for whom palliative care cannot relieve suffering, or provide the peaceful and painless death that everyone deserves.”
But Dr Gordon Macdonald, chief executive of Care Not Killing, insisted MPs must reject the Bill.
“The safest law is the one we currently have,” he said.
“This Bill is being rushed with indecent haste and ignores the deep-seated problems in the UK’s broken and patchy palliative care system, the crisis in social care and data from around the world that shows changing the law would put pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives.
“Indeed, the problems in end-of-life care, which have been chronicled in great detail in numerous academic and official reports have been explicitly recognised by our new Health Secretary and many other parliamentarians, who want to fix the system, not change the law. We agree with them.”
