A special committee in the House of Commons concluded its consideration last week of amendments to a landmark bill to legalize assisted suicide in the United Kingdom. Rejecting nearly all efforts to protect vulnerable people and provide procedural safeguards, the committee now sends a final bill to the full Commons for the Report Stage, during which only amendments may be discussed, and then on to the Third Reading, where no amendments are made and another vote on the bill will take place. The scheduled action on the Leadbeater bill, named after its prime sponsor in Parliament, Kim Leadbeater, MP for Spen Valley in West Yorkshire, could come as soon as April 25.

Assisted suicide has become perhaps the most contested domestic issue in British politics in years, and its ramifications may extend far beyond the nation’s shores. MP Danny Kruger delivered final remarks opposing the Leadbeater bill late in the evening on March 25, quoting the Hippocratic Oath and its clarion opposition to euthanasia as the contravention of the physician’s vocation. Kruger declaimed that everyone should “reflect on the essential principle that health care is the antidote to sickness and what we are opposing here in assisted suicide is the antidote to life.” Kruger went on to cite several amendments the Committee Stage had rejected, whose adoption would have brought the bill closer to affecting only those cases of extreme suffering its advocates claimed would be its sole impact. Kruger noted that he would still oppose such a bill as betraying the physician’s code but that it would at least be “honest” rather than the deceitful measure now moving forward.

Although the majority Labour Party is generally supportive of assisted suicide, on Thursday six Labour Party MPs wrote a compelling letter to their colleagues in which they detailed strong objections to the bill, which has been opposed by an array of social service agencies, medical associations, and palliative care providers. High on the list of concerns was the abandonment of the standard in the original bill approved last December to the effect that requests for assisted suicide would each be reviewed by the British High Court. That guarantee was dropped in favor of approvals being granted by a designated committee, which would include members like a psychiatrist and a social worker. The Labour critics, like Kruger, denounced the decision to lodge the suicide process in the National Health Service, whose core principle of beneficence they insist the bill subverts.

Overall, hundreds of amendments were rejected to what the letter signers called the “reckless and loose language in the bill.” Among other concerns, they cited:

• “Insufficient protections for children, people with anorexia, people with
  mental health conditions, those with learning difficulties, or victims of
  domestic and financial abuse”;
• “No impact assessments” on the scope or cost of the practice once
  implemented and no provision for improvement of palliative care
  designed to alleviate suffering while not taking life;
• No bar to physicians suggesting, promoting, or advertising assisted
  suicide to people who had not requested such information;
• No bar to private firms making a profit from the legislation by, for
  example, offering means and methods of suicide;
• No limit to public ads like the one that appeared on the London
  Underground sponsored by campaigners for assisted suicide, one of
  which incongruously showed a young, silk-pajama-clad woman dancing
  in her kitchen because of the legalization of assisted suicide.

Meanwhile, disability groups across the United Kingdom have kept up their efforts to defeat or delay the Leadbeater bill. The Disability News Service is the brainchild of disability journalist John Pring who researches and writes most of its content on practical and public policy issues facing the disabled in the U.K. The DNS site lists 14 disability organizations that subscribe to the DNS and disseminate its reports. The most recent release on Thursday covered an event on March 25 in the House of Lords, which will consider the Leadbeater bill after the Commons acts. There disability groups led by the U.K. chapter of Not Dead Yet met with Lords and MPs to lodge their objections to the bill, charging, as Baroness Jane Campbell said, that the process had left a “cohort of people … missing from the conversations.”

One of the leaders at the meeting was actor Liz Carr, who wrote and produced an award-winning documentary on assisted suicide shown on BBC-1 last year called “Better Off Dead?” Carr is a comedian known for roles in British television, most notably a seven-season crime drama called “Silent Witness,” and for a variety of edgy projects like “Assisted Suicide, the Musical,” which she wrote and starred in sold-out shows at Royal Festival Hall in London. Her documentary is credited even by supporters of legalized assisted suicide as making a provocative case for rejecting such laws. She explores attitudes toward the disabled, examines the consequences of Medical Aid in Dying in Canada, which started with limited application but now touches Canadians who are not terminally ill, and makes her case with acerbic humor and evident humanity. A review of the film in The Guardian concludes, “For a documentary about the right to die, this is an unflinching account of the urge to live. Whether the film changes the minds of assisted dying advocates — or whether it even should — will remain to be seen. But Carr has powerfully made her case: a disabled life is no less valuable or rich than any other.”

Disability groups have one of the clearest stakes in laws that pit the strong against the weak, the secure from those at risk. They bring to the table not only their own sense of worth but an understanding of how resort to measures like assisted suicide, backed by elites in society who command resources and control institutions, can set back efforts to provide support for people who need assistance with various aspects of daily living. One DNS article among many points to the impact of planned Labour Party cuts in Personal Independence Payments (PIP), asserting that they will drag a quarter million people into abject poverty. Social conditions can put a policy like assisted suicide into overdrive, even if the law were restrictively crafted, as the Leadbeater bill is not.

After months of battle in the public square, where does assisted suicide now stand in the mother of democracies? Far from being a distant debate, the struggle in the U.K. is hugely significant for America and the West. Over the past few decades assisted suicide has insinuated its dark footprints into the laws of a number of U.S. states, of Canada where it is gaining new ground, and of several European countries as well (the Netherlands has reported an increase of 10% in the number of assisted suicides in 2024, with psychiatric indications increasing from only two in 2010 to 219 people last year).

One of the few victories for assisted suicide opponents at the Committee Stage was the adoption of an amendment allowing the Parliament of Wales to vote separately before the measure can be applied there. Last October, the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd, held a vote, without force of law, to reject any legalization of assisted suicide by a margin of 26-19, with nine abstentions. The Committee Stage approved an amendment that will ensure assisted suicide does not come to Wales without a separate vote of the Senedd. A separate vote has just happened on the Isle of Man to approve assisted suicide there, and the bill goes to the final stage, royal assent, and its ultimate implementation in 2027.

On the subject of implementation, there was a bit more encouragement as well, as Leadbetter agreed to amend the two-year scheme in the original bill for a four-year timeline. As a result, if passed as is, assisted suicide could possibly not be carried out before another general election for Parliament. MP Kruger scorned the supporters of the bill for their evident unwillingness to allow a national debate on a momentous bill that has had support and opposition within nearly all the parties, including Labour, the Tories, and Reform. Could an issue like this drive a national election in the U.K., during this time of great economic uncertainty and disruption in foreign affairs? By all evidence, the British people are heavily engaged in the argument over legal and social protection for the sick and disabled. As always, questions like these try men’s souls and, as much as any issue, determine the character of nations.

Over the weekend, the Sunday Times published a story that expressed the hope of many. The headline read, “The assisted dying bill was doomed almost from the start.” News also emerged that an original supporter of the bill, MP Naz Shah, has changed her mind and now regards it as “fundamentally flawed.” Optimism exists that the measure’s weaknesses and harms have been revealed to all, and the Third Reading may lead to the demise of the bill — rather than the demise of the most vulnerable in our midst.