An i survey reveals support for the landmark measure, but many remain undecided
with many more MPs expected to vote in favour of it than at the last free vote more than a decade ago.shows that – at the moment – more than half of MPs are supportive to some degree of legalising assisted dying, as the Commons prepares to vote on the issue.Labour MP Kim LeadbeaterBefore the election Sir Keir Starmer pledged to allow Parliamentary time for a vote on the issue, following a, who has revealed she has lung cancer and has joined the Dignitas assisted dying clinic in Switzerland.
Gareth Owen, Professor of Psychological Medicine, Ethics and Law at King’s College London, said that assisted dying was “one of the big moral matters of our time”. “It is very likely that questions will continue to be raised about assisted dying beyond this bill if it were to become law. The big decision now is whether we’re ready to start the process” he continued.and will vote against it this time around, reflected that many forces could sway an MP when they are deciding how to vote.
MPs have also been known to change their minds on assisted dying, with some who voted in 2015 now indicating they may vote the opposite way.issued a survey to 639 MPs – excluding Sinn Fein, the Speaker and his deputies who do not vote on the Commons – and received direct responses from 93 MPs. Of these MPs, 45 expressed support for assisted dying, 19 were opposed and 11 stated they were undecided. 18 MPs declined to comment.
The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, are significantly more likely to be in favour of assisted dying with 46 out of their 72 MPs having expressed support, constituting 64 per cent of the parliamentary party. More than half of MPs who entered Parliament in 2017 and 2019 have also expressed support, but the numbers were lower for those elected before 2015.
That bill allowed assisted dying to only be available to adults deemed to have less than six months to live who had the mental capacity to make the decision. An individual would need the approval of two doctors, and the process of assisted dying could only go ahead under the supervision of a medical professional.
Many also want to see strict monitoring by the Government of the rollout – a requirement that is included in the Lord Falconer legislation.But some MPs have learned the opposite lesson from other countries that have legalised assisted dying, with many pointing to how legislation has been handled in Canada.
Concerns over the legislation extend all the way up to the Cabinet. Keir Starmer has said in the past that he is supportive of assisted dying but his deputy Angela Rayner voted against the legislation in 2015, and has not confirmed if this remains her view.this year that she was opposed. “I feel that once you cross that line, you’ve crossed it for ever,” she said.
His mother, based in the UK, was not able to access assisted dying, and he described how she “died slowly in bed on a morphine drip, with constant nursing to look after her in her dying days”. “Those who feel a burden; those with long-term mental illness; and those who’ve just run out of hope. As with capital punishment, any system that takes life will inevitably end up with unintended, unnecessary and unjust deaths.”
“Good palliative care can remove the concerns that people will have a difficult death, instead providing people with the pain relief, care and support necessary to have a ‘good death’,” she continued. In the US state of Oregon, for example, doctors can prescribe lethal drugs but they cannot give them to the individual, who must take them themselves.
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