MP to Introduce Bill on Assisted Suicide

File photo of an elderly woman's hands dated Dec. 22, 2016. Yui Mok/PA Wire

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater will introduce a bill on assisted suicide to the House of Commons on Oct. 16, as another similar bill in the Lords is expected to be debated next month.

Details on Leadbeater’s Private Members’ bill, covering England and Wales, have not been released but are likely to be similar to Lord Charles Falconer’s Private Members’ bill in the House of Lords, where terminally ill adults with less than six months to live can gain medical assistance to end their lives.

The MP for Spen Valley said on Thursday, “Parliament should now be able to consider a change in the law that would offer reassurance and relief—and most importantly, dignity and choice—to people in the last months of their lives.”

Leadbeater, the sister of murdered MP Jo Cox, won top place in the private members ballot, which gives her priority on a Friday sitting. The first reading will take place on Oct. 16, with a vote expected in December.

This will be the first time the issue will be debated in the House of Commons since 2015, when an assisted suicide bill was defeated.

Falconer said he looks forward to “working with Kim and colleagues across both Houses to ensure that a safe, compassionate assisted dying law is passed.”

‘Disaster in Waiting’

Dr. Gordon Macdonald, chief executive of Care Not Killing, said the bill’s introduction was “clearly disappointing news.”

Macdonald said, “I would strongly urge the Government to focus on fixing our broken palliative care system that sees up to one in four Brits who would benefit from this type of care being unable to access it, rather than discussing again this dangerous and ideological policy.”

Right to Life UK described the proposed legislation as a “disaster in waiting.”

The group’s spokeswoman Catherine Robinson said making assisted suicide legal “poses an acute threat to vulnerable people, especially in the context of a struggling healthcare system,” saying that “within this setting, certain people will likely be particularly vulnerable to coercion.”

“With an NHS described by the sitting Health Secretary as ‘broken’, and the 100,000 people who need palliative care dying each year without receiving it, this assisted suicide legislation is a disaster in waiting,” Robinson said.

“Every suicide is a tragedy and this remains the case for those suffering at the end of their life,” she continued.

Robinson said passing the bill “would be an extremely poor indictment of our healthcare system and society as a whole.”

‘Safeguards and Protections’

Private Members’ bills are public bills introduced by MPs and Lords who are not government ministers. While only a minority of Private Members’ bills become law, the issue is being pressed by high-profile campaigners like Dame Esther Rantzen, who has been living with stage four lung cancer since May 2023.

Besides the similar Private Members’ bill being put forward in the House of Lords, there are other pieces of proposed assisted suicide legislation being debated at various stages in the Scottish Parliament and in the assemblies of the British Crown Dependencies of Jersey and the Isle of Man.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had previously said he was “personally in favour of changing the law” to allow for assisted suicide after promising Rantzen he would allow a free vote on the measures if he became prime minister.

Speaking on Friday, Starmer said:“I’m very pleased that I’m able, as it were, to make good on the promise I made to Esther Rantzen.

“The Government will be neutral on this as you know, but I did make that commitment to a free vote and I am sticking to that commitment.”

Undated handout photo of Kim Leadbeater, Labour MP for Spen Valley. PA Media

While Leadbeater said that the bill would have “the right safeguards and protections in place,” campaigners like Kevin Yuill, the CEO of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, have warned that safeguards put in place for similar laws around the world—such as Canada and The Netherlands—have not been maintained, with access to state-assisted suicide widening to include those with non-terminal conditions and mental suffering.

“We will go down that track if we legalise assisted suicide in this country. There is no question,” Yuill told NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” in May.

PA Media contributed to this report.