Kim Leadbeater has said her bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill people is “not about ending their lives, it’s about shortening their death”.
Leadbeater, the Labour MP for Spen Valley, will table a Private Member’s Bill to the House of Commons to legalise the practice on Wednesday. The proposal would allow terminally ill, mentally competent people to end their own life.
A debate and vote for MPs will take place on 29 November. MPs will be allowed to vote freely with their conscience next month, rather than along party lines as is usually the case.
Similar assisted dying bills were defeated in the commons in 2015 and the Lords in 2021.
Prime minister Keir Starmer had said he was “committed” to allowing a vote on legalising assisted dying should his party win the general election.
Ahead of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill’s first reading, Leadbeater told LBC: “There would be two doctors involved in this process and a High Court judge as well, so there would be layers and layers of protections.
“They have to have mental capacity, they have to be mentally competent… There would be a cooling-off period so people could change their mind at any times. People who sign up to this often don’t use this but the comfort that it provides to them, knowing that it is a choice, enables them to get the very best of what they have left of life.
“There are countries where this is done very, very well and it is a very strict set of criteria and it has never expanded, those criteria. Oregon is one example, the state in America. If we get this right from the start we are giving people the choice I believe they deserve but it will be a very robust piece of legislation.”
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Citing the work of Dame Esther Rantzen, who has long campaigned to legalise assisted dying, she added: “This is also about the lived experience of thousands of people across this country including Dame Esther… All she wants is the choice… I think we’ve got a duty and a moral obligation to change the law for these people.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, however, has called the idea of assisted dying “dangerous”.
Justin Welby warned legalising the practice would lead to a “slippery slope” where more people would feel compelled to have their life ended medically.
“For 30 years as a priest I’ve sat with people at their bedside. And people have said, ‘I want my mum, I want my daughter, I want my brother to go because this is so horrible’”, the Archbishop of Canterbury told the BBC.
He added: “What I’m saying is that introducing this legislation opens the way to it broadening out such that people who are not in that situation [terminally ill] asking for this, or feeling pressured to ask for it.”
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on X/Twitter here.
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