Campaigners on both sides of the assisted dying debate remain sharply divided after the failure of a bill that would have allowed terminally ill people with less than six months to live to end their lives in England and Wales. The legislation, which had passed the House of Commons, fell after peers subjected it to extensive amendments and debate.
Supporters, including terminally ill people and campaign groups, accused a small group of unelected peers of sabotaging the bill. Sarah Wootton, chief executive of Dignity in Dying, said "implacable opponents" had dominated Lords debates and tabled amendments to talk out the legislation. "It's absolutely shameless what a tiny group, less than 1% of the unelected, the upper house, has done," she said. Hannah Slater, 38, who has terminal breast cancer, described the failure as "not democratic", adding: "It's devastating for people who want to be able to choose how to die when we've got a terminal illness."
Opponents argued the bill was poorly drafted and lacked practical safeguards. Tanni Grey-Thompson, a cross-bench peer and former Paralympian, said: "The bill fell because it's badly written. It needs to be much, much tighter than what we've got." She rejected criticism of the 1,200 amendments, noting that a single change, such as replacing "people with disabilities" with the accepted term "disabled people", required 12 separate amendments. Disability rights campaigner Pete Donnelly praised the peers' scrutiny, saying the legislation would otherwise have been "waived through" without adequate examination. He described the bill as "unsafe" and "lethal".
Some MPs and peers also expressed reservations. Labour MP Josh Fenton-Glynn, who abstained on the bill's second reading, said it still lacked sufficient safeguards to protect terminally ill people from coercion by relatives. Labour peer Luciana Berger argued that the bill should have undergone pre-legislative scrutiny, as with other private members' bills on issues of conscience, such as the bill that introduced abortion rights.
The development has left supporters and opponents at odds over the way forward, with some urging the government to introduce a fully scrutinised bill, while others maintain that the proposed legislation remains fundamentally flawed.
