Labour MP Ashley Dalton, who has incurable metastatic breast cancer, has urged her parliamentary colleagues not to bring back the assisted dying bill for England and Wales. The former public health minister, who resigned from her role in March to focus on treatment, said the bill had become a 'pretty dangerous set of affairs' by its third reading.
Dalton, 53, revealed she has triple-negative breast cancer that has spread to her ovaries and is now on intravenous chemotherapy after oral treatment stopped working. She said she found it frustrating to hear MPs speak about the bill without being able to share her own experience of a terminal diagnosis.
The bill, tabled by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, would legalise assisted dying for terminally ill people with less than six months to live. It passed the Commons but ran out of time in the Lords after opponents laid more than 1,000 amendments. Supporters hope to bring it back using the Parliament Act.
Dalton said she is not 'dogmatically against' assisted dying but believes the bill was flawed because rejected amendments could have made it stronger. She described reviving it as 'foolish' given the complexity and division it caused, and warned it could further split the Labour party.
