Last year I voted to give Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill a second reading in the House of Commons. I had many concerns but thought it was right for Parliament to debate this issue and for the Bill to be able to begin its journey through Parliament. As is often the case, the Bill met stiff opposition under scrutiny in the House of Lords and ran out of time. Today I voted against the same Bill as it was reintroduced. Why?
My position on assisted dying hasn’t changed: I support a change to the law to allow doctors to provide patients facing a painful, demeaning and humiliating death in the final stages of a terminal disease to die with dignity. This is what most of our hospitals and our wonderful palliative care clinics go out of their way to provide already – but too often they do so in fear of the current legal position and the threat of legal or disciplinary challenge.
I do not want to live in a society which signals that life becomes less sacred when painful
But given the gravity of the moral, ethical, clinical and societal concerns this issue inevitably raises, I do not think this Private Member’s Bill (PMB) is the appropriate or correct way to do it.
I had been minded to vote in what’s called a “positive abstention” in Parliamentary convention – voting both AYE to signal support for the aims of the Bill and NO to signal that I don’t think this Bill is the correct mechanism.
