Assisted dying bill overwhelmingly rejected by MPs

MPs have voted overwhelmingly against changing the law to allow doctors to help terminally ill people end their lives.

In their first vote on the issue for about 20 years, the Commons rejected the assisted dying bill introduced by Rob Marris, a Labour MP who had argued that it was about ensuring peaceful deaths rather than euthanasia.

The debate was heated on both sides, with many MPs drawing on their personal experiences of dying relatives to give weight to their arguments. However, opponents outnumbered supporters by 212, with 330 voting against and 118 in favour.

The debate came to the Commons after the supreme court said in 2014 it could not make a ruling in favour of Tony Nicklinson’s right to die because it was a matter for parliament.

Peers discussed the arguments in the last parliament, when Lord Falconer introduced an assisted dying bill that would have allowed doctors to prescribe a lethal dose to terminally ill patients judged to have less than six months to live. They were evenly split when the bill was given its second reading in the House of Lords and the legislation was nodded through to committee stage without division.

However, it was held up by amendments and ran out of time before the end of the last parliament. After the election, Falconer suggested his proposals would have more of a chance if they were taken up by an MP in the Commons.

Even if MPs had voted in favour, the bill had only a slim chance of becoming law because David Cameron had indicated he was not in favour of legalising assisted dying. Any private member’s bill needs some degree of support from the government to allow it time for debate.

Under the proposals, a terminally ill person would have been able to request assistance with ending his or her life if diagnosed as having less than six months to live. A high court judge would have had to confirm that the person was of full capacity and had a voluntary, settled and informed wish to end his or her life, having made a declaration signed by two doctors.

Passions ran high from the beginning of the parliamentary debate. Crispin Blunt, a Conservative former minister whose parents and father-in-law died of cancer, made the case for people to be given a choice how to end their lives, saying he was somewhat “appalled that the Catholic and faith lobby seek to limit personal autonomy”.

Keir Starmer, the Labour MP and former director of public prosecutions, also gave an important speech in favour, after laying out his reasons for deciding in a number of cases not to prosecute people who had helped dying relatives to end their lives abroad.

On the other side, Caroline Spelman, a Conservative former environment secretary, said the sanctity of life should be respected and older people should not feel they are a burden on their families.

Fiona Bruce, the Tory MP for Congleton, described the bill as “legally and ethically totally unacceptable”, while the former defence secretary, Liam Fox, said the legislation would open a “Pandora’s box” and “overturn 2,000 years of the Hippocratic oath”. Labour MP Lyn Brown said she was concerned elderly people could be “emotionally blackmailed” by relatives to end their lives. However, George Howarth, also Labour, said he felt it could be a “perfectly rational choice for people to say they do not want to be a burden on family and friends”.

One of the most emotional interventions was from Labour’s Yasmin Qureshi, who said her 83-year-old mother had been given three days to live and began to say she felt a burden on her family and could not go on, yet survived and fully recovered.

Another Labour MP, Jim Fitzpatrick, said his use of asbestos gloves and other clothing during his time in the fire service had led him to fear a painful death from mesothelioma. “If that’s what lies in store for me, I want to control my own death,” he said.

Ahead of the debate, MPs were being lobbied heavily by both sides. This week, a group of senior doctors wrote to the Guardian saying the current law on assisted dying was “dangerous and cruel” for forcing terminally ill patients to end their lives abroad.

On the other side, campaigners such as the Paralympian Tanni
Grey-Thompson argue that disabled people in particular are worried about the implications of the bill.

Lady Grey-Thompson wrote in the Guardian: “I fear that the MP Rob Marris’s assisted dying bill, which will get its second reading in parliament on Friday, would exacerbate the assumption that because there may be some things I cannot do, everything must be negative. The prospect of changing the criminal law on encouraging and assisting suicide, as this bill would do, fills me with dread.”

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, was among the faith leaders who warned in the Observer that Britain would cross a “legal and ethical Rubicon” if parliament votes to permit terminally ill patients to end their lives.