THINKING THROUGH WHY WE SHOULD NOT OPEN THIS DOOR

The debate about legalising assisted suicide has compassion on both sides.

There’s the compassion that focuses on the individual. And there’s a wider, deeper compassion that asks, “What’s best for everyone in society?

There are key questions which everyone must think through.

  • Can it be done safely
  • Should this be a priority now?
  • What are the consequences of changing the law? 

Politicians have a duty of care to all their constituents.

They should not pass laws that put them at risk.  We need to find an alternative way forward that’s best for everyone?

If you think legalising euthanasia or assisted suicide is just about giving choice to a few people dying with a terminal illness, think again.

It ends up putting thousands of people into a position where they feel they have no choice.

Choice for a few means pressure and coercion for many. 

Even with the best of intentions,  assisted suicide laws inevitably put thousands of people under complex pressures which limit the freedom of their choice.

The Health Secretary himself worries about coercion not giving people a real choice.

“I do not think that palliative care, end-of-life care in this country is in a condition yet where we are giving people the freedom to choose without being coerced by the lack of support available.”​

WES STREETING, MP.  Secretary of State for Health and Social Care

When people are properly cared for they rarely want to end their lives, but 100,000 people a year do not get the palliative care they need.

Good quality palliative care relieves symptoms and can give people who are ternimally ill precious extra time to spend with their loved ones.  Yet one in four Brits who would benefit from palliative care are unable to access it.

A healthy society should assist vulnerable, disabled, and terminally ill people in how to live their lives, rather than how to die.

Should not our priority first be to fix the vital ecosystem of social care and palliative care?

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

It can't be done safely

No-one should be pressured to end their life.

Many will look at the state of the NHS – long waiting lists, staff shortages, budget cuts – and be influenced by the lack of care available to them.

The prospect of a long wait with inadequate care -vs- the promise of a quick death creates a structural coercion that pushes people into a position where they feel they have no other option.

Many will choose it because they don’t want to be a burden on others, or on the NHS.

More than half of all the people who had an assisted suicide in Oregon between 2018 and 2022 (53% over 5 years) cited ‘feeling a burden on family, friends and caregivers’ as one of their reasons for ending their lives.

Many will feel pressured to choose it by isolation and loneliness.

Over two thousand, two hundred people in 2022 cited ‘isolation and loneliness’ as a reason for their death under Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying system.

Many people will be forced into assisted suicide  because they can’t access or afford the social care they need when they can no longer look after themselves.

Many may worry about the financial burden of continuing care, or about eroding the inheritance they will leave their loved ones.

People’s families may put pressure on them, deliberately or unintentionally, which can influence the choice to have an assisted suicide death.

This is where issues like coercive control, elder abuse (financial or psychological) and neglect play a significant role. No system of safeguards can prevent it happening.

It’s impossible to legislate safely for assisted suicide without negative outcomes for thousands of people.

ELDERLY
PEOPLE

VULNERABLE
PEOPLE

PEOPLE WITH
DISABILITIES

PEOPLE IN
POVERTY

Even people who support it in principle feel it is too complicated to be safely implemented in practice

56%, of those who express an opinion, support legalising assisted dying / assisted suicide in principle but feel there are too many complicating factors to make it a practical and safe option to implement in Britain.

(Whitestone Insight surveyed 2001 GB adults online between 5 and 6 June 2024)

This is not a party-political issue either. Ed Davey is worried about “the impact on the psychology… …of elderly people and some disabled people.”

The more that people find out about what happens after legalisation, the more they change their mind from support to opposition.

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

Leading disability rights campaigners – Tanni Grey-Thompson and Liz Carr – echo these concerns about pressure

When people with a disabilty get a terminal illness, they will feel disproportionately under more pressure to have an assisted suicide.

In one sense, they face the same pressures as everyone else.

But they have to contend with them at a more profound and intensified level due to their unique circumstances.

But they also face additional pressures that the rest of us don’t.

Demoralisation is a bigger problem. Internal feelings of burden or guilt mean that many are more prone to feel the need to justify their existence in a way that able bodied people simply do not feel.

Too many disabled people are used to having their lives judged as not worth living.

Their lives are often harder than they should be, because of inadequate services, benefit challenges and ableist prejudice in society.

Tanni Grey-Thompson has lost count of the number of times she’s been told, “If my life was like yours I would kill myself.”

As Liz Carr points out in her BBC documentary, “Many of us feel that assisted suicide creates a two tier system;  suicide prevention for some, suicide approval for others.” 

Many disabled people and organisations are deeply concerned they’ll be offered assisted suicide without asking for it.

Here are some examples from Canada that show how ableist attitudes and disdain for disability can lead healthcare professionals to make unprompted and inappropriate suggestions.

HEATHER HANCOCK

Heather is a 56-year-old Canadian woman with Spastic Cerebral Palsy.
During one hospital stay for treatment for muscular spasms, a nurse said to her, “You should do the right thing and consider MAiD. You’re being selfish. If I were you, I would take it in a heartbeat. You’re not living, you’re existing!” 

CHRISTINE GAUTHIER

Retired Canadian soldier and Paralympic athlete Christine suffers with PTSD. She had been trying to get a wheelchair ramp installed in her home for five years.
After hearing her describe her deteriorating condition, a Veterans Affairs worker told her, “Madam, if you are really so desperate, we can give you Medical Assistance in Dying now.”

ROGER FOLEY

47-year-old Roger suffers from cerebellar ataxia, a disease that attacks the brain and muscles and has been bedridden for around eight years.
He secretly recorded a conversation with staff at a London, Ontario hospital, where he was told that keeping him alive would cost “north of $1500 a day” and had he considered MAiD?

Liz Carr’s “Better Off Dead?” documentary is a must watch if you want to understand why so many people with disabilities are so concerned.

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

It Hits The Poorest Hardest

Poorer people with terminal illnesses will also feel disproportionately under more pressure to have an assisted suicide.

Disadvantaged families are hit hardest by the costs associated with terminal illness. They can spend as much as 98% of their income on the added costs brought on by terminal illness.

Living with a terminal illness can bring many extra costs.

Loss of income, additional care costs, hospital travel, increased utility bills, home adaptations, respite care, etc.

Marie Curie reports “The average cost can be between £12,000 to £16,000 per year.”

Two thirds of households affected by terminal illness experience financial strain as a result.

The provision of palliative care in the UK is unequal.

Patients with greater deprivation are least likely to access palliative care. Socio-economically deprived groups are increasingly less likely to die in hospices.

A new report from Ontario confirms that the poor and disadvantaged are more likely to request a so-called assisted death.

Canadian cases show that feeling pressured financially, especially when there is a lack of social or care support, can drive people to seek an assisted death.

AMIR FARSOUD

A 54-year-old disabled man applied for MAiD because he was losing his shared social housing. He qualified for MAiD due to chronic back pain.
“It’s not my first choice,” Farsoud said. “I don’t want to die but I don’t want to be homeless more than I don’t want to die.” 
He only stopped his application after a crowdfunder raised enough to pay for new accomodation.

MICHAEL FRASER

55-year-old Michael was sick, poor and lonely. He didn’t have a terminal illness but had not been outside for over a month because there was no lift in his building and he couldn’t navigate stairs. 
The doctor who euthanised him said, “Poverty is pushing people to MAID … For sure, I think the fact that he had trouble paying his rent made it harder for him to be in this world.”

“SUSAN”

Susan had multiple disabilities but none of her diagnoses were terminal. Her dietary restrictions meant food banks were not an option.
“An increase [in income support] is the only thing that could save my life. I have no other reason to want to apply for assisted suicide, other than I simply cannot afford to keep on living.”

“SOPHIA” and “DENISE”

Sophia, a 51-year-old Ontario woman with severe multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), chose a MAiD death after she couldn’t find any affordable housing free of cigarette smoke and chemical cleaners.
Denise, who also has MCS, said, “I’ve applied for MAiD essentially…because of abject poverty.”

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

It Undermines Suicide Prevention

Society should try to prevent suicide, not assist it.

The business of suicide prevention is seriously undermined by passing an “assisted dying” law because it changes suicide from being something that society regards as detrimental and to be discouraged into something that is regarded as a valid option.

Laws send social messages.

This bill sends a dog whistle message to the terminally ill, vulnerable, elderly and disabled people, especially those on low or fixed incomes that their lives are worth less than others and that ending those lives is an appropriate function of the state.

A growing body of data shows that legalising assisted suicide seems to be associated with an increase in the numbers taking their own lives in the general population.

Oregon was associated with an increase of 6.3 per cent in the numbers of suicides, once all other factors had been controlled. Among over-65s the figure was more than double that.

KATHRIN MENTLER

Kathrin was experiencing suicidal ideation and went to the Vancouver General Hospital for help. She was told by a counsellor that there were no available beds and the earliest that she could talk to a psychiatrist was in five months.
She was then asked, “Have you ever considered MAiD?” The clinician said that overdosing at home could lead to brain damage whereas a MAiD death was more ‘comfortable.’

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

There are significant legal concerns

This Bill will dramatically and fundamentally change the role of judges in England and Wales.

Currently judges can rule on end-of-life cases, but their powers extended only to authorising the withdrawal of treatment, not the administration of treatment intended to cause death.

Legal professionals have expressed concerns over the viability of a proposed ‘safeguard” which requires judicial oversight of each assisted suicide application.

Where is this money for all this extra work going to come from? Who is going to pay for it?

There could be thousands of applications for assisted suicide to the Family Court every year.

Each case will require significant legal time to be considered but there are only 20 full-time judges in the Family Division and they are under huge pressure already.
Where are all the extra judges that we would need going to come from?

This has bewildered the legal profession, with a senior judge, Sir James Mumby (a former president of the Family Division) querying, “Is this a proper function for the judges? Is this truly a judicial function at all?”

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

Now is not the time

The NHS is broken.  Our amazing social care and palliative care system is under too much strain already.

How can we expect it to cope with the enormous pressure that implementing this law would add?

The UK has long been a world leader in palliative care but we have patchy provision, chronic underfunding and many people cannot access specialist care when they need it.

According to the Marie Curie Better End of Life Report 2024:
  • Too many people die in pain and without the support they need for their symptoms.
  • Gaps in 24/7 community care prevent people from dying in comfort at home.
  • Workforce capacity is insufficient to meet demand for palliative and end-of-life care: 1 in 5 people who died had no contact with a GP in the last three months of life.

Our hospice sector is in crisis. One in five hospices in the UK are cutting services because of lack of funding, pushing people back into an inadequate NHS at the end of their lives.

Many hospices are charities, relying on public donations, charity shops and bake sales. Only 20-30% of hospice funding comes from the NHS, and it has not kept up with the rate of inflation.

Only 4% of the public think legalising assisted suicide should be a priority for politicians.

74% of the public think the priority for politicians should be to reduce NHS waiting lists.

Introducing assisted suicide when the NHS and hospices are under such pressure would inevitably compromise palliative care.

Funding is put at risk because the incentive for government to invest in high-quality palliative and social care is reduced.

Resources and staff time will be diverted from front line care into administration and facilitation of assisted suicide.

Medical professionals and officials will need to spend time thinking about implementation, not thinking about the other challenges their specialism faces.

It will cause problems with recruitment and retention of specialist palliative care doctors.

Many would resign or retire early if forced to participate. This would lead to end-of-life care and other treatments becoming less accessible for patients and increased pain and suffering for many due to a lack of specialist palliative care provision.

The NHS is supposed to be  cradle to grave, not cradle ’til we’re too old, expensive and inconvenient.

Saving money should never be a reason to kill old or vulnerable people. But cutting costs would be an inevitable incentive for bureaucrats.

Assisting suicide has the capacity to corrupt the NHS by creating an incentive for health professionals to encourage some patients to end their lives early.

 At the same time, there would be a perverse incentive to not restrain assisted suicide since it is cheaper to have people end their lives rather than to provide palliative or social care.

As happens in Canada, some doctors would come to see assisted suicide as a first line treatment for specific illnesses and not pursue other forms of treatment for a range of conditions.

ALLISON DUCLUZEAU

In November 2022, Allison was diagnosed with Stage 4 abdominal cancer and given two months to live. She was told it was inoperable, and she should go home, sort out her affairs and decide if she wanted medical assistance in dying.
Unable to get treatment in Canada, she raised money and sold her house to fund private treatment in Maryland USA which was successful. Today, Allison is in remission.

“I would tell Britain to only accept assisted dying when the health service is fixed— otherwise it is a very dangerous step to take. We deserve decent and timely care rather than offers of faster death.”

Right wing commentators are already writing that “We can’t afford a taboo on assisted dying.”

Matthew Parris wrote that the fact that pressure will grow on the terminally ill to hasten their own deaths is not a bad thing.

It completely changes the doctor patient relationship.

  • Some patients will only want to see a doctor who will not end their lives.
  • Some communities will become more reluctant to access healthcare.

How might this also impact the treatment for other non-terminal illness?

Millions of patients are not getting the care they deserve. Legalising assisted suicide will draw in those people whose conditions become terminal because they do not receive the care they should have.

This issue is too important to rush through now without considering all the consequences.

Legalising assisted suicide will have enormous consequences for our society. Significant societal change should not be decided when we have not been able to examine all the problems and then explore all the solutions.

Surely the priority of the NHS must be to care and ease suffering?

Let’s champion social and palliative care and make fixing it a priority.

The Claim

We will put “the strictest possible safeguards” in place to protect vulnerable people.

The Problem

There is a fundamental flaw that causes safeguards to slip and fall.

The Agenda

The dirty secret is that activist groups have a roadmap for how to extend the laws once the principle is passed.

The Stakes

This is irreversible. Get this wrong and there’s no going back.

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

Can we trust the safeguards?

No country in the world has safely legalised ‘assisted dying.’

The Danish Ethics Council recently examined them all in a report for the Danish Government which concluded, “it is in principle impossible to establish proper regulation of euthanasia.”   

What makes us think that our politicians will be able to do the impossible?

Can we expect Westminster to achieve something that no other parliament in the world has been able to?

Parliamentary sovereignty means that it’s impossible for a parliament in the UK to pass a law that can’t be amended by a future parliament.

And courts in the UK, whilst they would not introduce an assisted suicide law by judicial legislation, can interpret and expand statute law after it has been introduced by parliament.

The fundamental problem is that, as soon as an assisted suicide law is passed, it legislates into existence a form of discrimination.

All assisted suicide laws discriminate between those who have access to it and those who do not – which is inevitably challenged in court, or changed in parliament, on equality grounds.

After all, it’s about giving people equal access to a ‘healthcare service’.

It’s not fair, so the well-rehearsed argument goes, to exclude people from eligibility because their suffering is due to a chronic illness, or a mental illness. We must treat people equally, right?

Canada is a roadmap to learn lessons about how safeguards are changed.

No one is proposing the current Canadian euthanasia model for the UK. But Canada started off with a much tighter system, very similar to UK proposals.
And, given that Canada is an English-speaking country which has a very similar public healthcare system to our own, it’s essential to understand how and why their safeguards collapsed, so that we can avoid the same mistakes.

Equal access is the reason why Canada’s ‘terminal illness only’ safeguard lasted less than 5 years.

Originally, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) was only available to adults with a grievous and irremediable medical condition whose death was reasonably foreseeable. The Canadian government was forced to change this safeguard by a court case brought on equality grounds.

Canada extended MAiD to include people with chronic illnesses and disabilities.

They also removed other safeguards for people with terminal illness which had come to be seen as ‘barriers to access’.

An expansion to include Canadians suffering solely from mental illness is legislated to come into effect in 2027.

It should have begun in 2024 but the implementation was delayed over fears that their mental health service was inadequate and not ready for it.

Where next? Mature minors? Dementia?

A further expansion to include mature minors and allow advance directives for people with dementia have been recommended by a federal joint parliamentary committee.

As you make the state the arbiter of who can, and who cannot, have a state-assisted death, you turn the safeguards into the political football. 

That opens the door to the different activist lobby groups who disagree about where the limits should be. Humanists UK and My Death, My Decision both want a much wider law than the one Dignity in Dying currently advocates for.

Safeguards are quickly seen as barriers to access, leading to demands to extend the law.

It’s interesting to note how the language shifts after legalisation.  ‘Robust safeguards’ quickly become characterised as ‘unjust restrictions’

How much do you trust NHS & government administration?

Can you imagine a scenario where backlogs in the NHS and court systems caused the complex countersigning of applications by two doctors and a judge to prevent the timely implementation of an assisted death? How long would it take for calls to begin for these ‘unjust restrictions’ to be streamlined?

All assisted suicide laws sow the seeds of their own expansion.

The rationale for changing the law in the first place is quickly leveraged as the justification for extending it. Politicians must be inconsistent and arbitrary to deny the logical conclusion of their own position, so it becomes illogical not to extend the law.

If the underlying reason for allowing assisted suicide is to give people autonomy and choice, on what consistent basis would you deny choice to someone else?

What do you think the people who feel they are being unfairly discriminated against would do?

If the underlying reason is to end unbearable suffering, it is not obvious why it should be restricted to terminally ill people.

Arguably, the suffering of people with chronic illnesses is worse because there is no end in sight. Many would argue that suffering with psychiatric pain is just as valid as physical pain.   

If the wording is vague enough, the law doesn’t even need to be changed. It can simply be reinterpreted.

In the Netherlands, euthanasia was legalised in 2001 for adults with ‘unbearable suffering’ and no prospect of cure. In the first few years the cases focussed on physical pain.  In 2008, cases started to rise where ‘unbearable suffering’ was interpreted to include psychiatric pain.  

Before this bill was even launched we already had fifty MPs calling to go beyond ‘terminal illness only’ and include those are ‘incurably suffering’.

If assisted suicide is legalised in the UK, it will inevitably be extended to include wider and wider categories of people.

The ‘safeguards’ are not really safe.

Safeguards can never be enough to protect vulnerable members of the public.
But they can be enough to lure legislators into changing the law, through an appearance of safety.

When the negative outcomes are easy to see because they have already happened abroad…

and when you being to realise that you cannot prevent the same thing happening here…

to open the door is to intend those outcomes.

The only safeguard that works is the current law.

The only safe way to proceed is to maintain the prohibition of killing and to not open the door to assisted suicide in the first place.

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

How do people with Anorexia qualify?

In Oregon, people with anorexia who refuse treatment are deemed to be terminally ill and can be given assisted suicide.

One study shows over 60 cases of people with anorexia being given assisted suicide have occurred in Belgium, the Netherlands and the USA.

DONNA DUNCAN

61-year-old retired Canadian nurse, Donna, had concussion after a minor car accident. This led to months of mental and physical decline during which she began to restrict her food intake. 
Unable to be seen by a local clinic due to the waiting list, she applied for MAiD and was approved within days on account of her low weight.  Soon after, she was euthanised despite her daughters’ objections that she lacked mental capacity for the decision

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

Depression

Clinical depression is associated with terminal illness in about 25 percent of people.

In Oregon only around 1% (3 people) of those having an assisted suicide were referred for psychiatric evaluation in 2023. That means around 87 people, who would have been clinciially depressed, were given assistance to commit suicide without being given basic psychiatric support or treatment.

ALAN NICHOLS

The 61-year-old had a history of depression and was hospitalised over fears he was suicidal.
In less than a month he had been euthanised despite concerns being raised by his brother and a healthcare professional.  He had no terminal illnesses, and the reason listed on his MAiD application was “hearing loss.” His brother, Gary, says hospital staff helped him put in the request and he was basically put to death.

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

Legalising assisted suicide doesn't solve all the problems. It creates different ones.

There will still be bad deaths

Some people will still travel abroad

There will still be family trauma

Death by lethal drugs may not be peaceful, painless or quick

The lethal drugs administered under ‘assisted dying’ schemes are often the same ones used to execute prisoners on death row in the USA.​

Professor Joel Zivot of Emory university has written that when assisted suicide deaths use the same form of lethal drugs given as part of American death penalty protocols people can die from drowning in their own secretions as fluid collects in the lungs (what doctors call a pulmonary oedema).

"Feeling like you're drowning in your own body - where's the dignity in that death?"

Sometimes the drugs do not work and the person does not die.

Sometimes the drugs cause distressing side effects before the person dies.

The bitter taste of the drug cocktails means people can experience difficulty swallowing drugs, vomiting, seizures and even regaining consciousness (after ingesting the drugs).

And sometimes it can take a long time for the person to die.

Nearly 7% of people take more than 6 hours.
In one Oregon case, it took 137 hours – more than 5½ days

The Denver Post described the 2017 assisted suicide death of a Colorado man diagnosed with cancer, which took over 9 hours, like this:​

“On the day of Kurt’s death, Susan [his wife] mixed the liquids prescribed as directed and Kurt began drinking the compound. ‘But with every sip,’ Susan says, ‘he’s choking and coughing, choking and coughing.’ It went on for nearly 20 minutes…

Although he never regained consciousness, the gasping, uneven breathing continued. Two hours passed. Then 4 hours. ‘At 4:15,’ Susan says, ‘I started to majorly panic’’.As she tried without success to reach a doctor, a couple more disturbing thoughts crossed her mind: She feared that Kurt, despite his unconsciousness, could hear everything — the calls, the desperation in her voice. And she wondered if his choking when he first took the medication meant that he had aspirated enough to delay its effect.

Around 7 pm, she asked the hospice to send a nurse. Shortly after the nurse arrived, a doctor called and suggested some additional measures. Soon after, Susan saw her husband sit up slightly and appear to retch three times. She ran to his bedside. Then he slid back into his pillows and stopped breathing.

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

Some people will fall through the social care net and still travel abroad

People who do not meet the qualifying criteria for assisted suicide in the UK will still travel abroad to end their lives.

Marie Lopez chose to travel to Switzerland after Conservative government cuts caused Buckinghamshire County Council to significantly reduce her social care package. Suffering from Crohn’s disease, she would still not qualify under current UK proposals. 

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

Families will still have traumatic experiences

How do we help relatives who only hear about the assisted suicide of a loved one after they’re dead?

Cheryl Heibert qualified for MAiD in Canada through having early onset Alzheimer’s.  She chose to be euthanised while her memory and capacity remained good.  The family didn’t know and never had a chance to say goodbye.
Her sister Cyntia said, I’m so angry because you cannot heal. It has now been how many months and it’s still haunting me, and I know it’s still haunting my dad.”

What will end-of-life care look like in 2045?

By then, the number of people over 85-years-old is projected by NHS England to almost double to 3.1 million

Will assisted suicide become so normalised in society that the right to die will become a duty to die?

Or will Labour’s new legacy prove to have been the timely development of an end-of-life care service that is fit for the future?

Everyone deserves a dignified death

We don’t lose dignity because we have an illness or disease or we need looking after in a difficult situation. We respect people’s dignity by caring for them well. Lack of dignity comes when we are not being looked after and don’t get the care we need.  

What if we can improve the quality of dying for everyone in the UK?

We can certainly begin to do that if people can access palliative care earlier, at home and out of hours and at weekends.

EARLY REFERRAL

Palliative care should begin at the point of terminal diagnosis to anticipate and mitigate the common problems of a terminal illness.

Early referral pays dividends. It relieves pressure on GPs and acute hospital services when patients don’t need to see their GP or go to A&E for pain relief and symptom support. 

HOSPICE AT HOME

Offering more people palliative care at home will help reduce the pressure on the NHS.

It not only reduces hospital admissions, and crises visits to A&E, but also supports a faster discharge in the event of an admission.  It even reduces costs by more than doubling the number of those likely to die at home.

OUT-OF-HOURS

Palliative care needs to be available when we need it most.

There are particular shortages of palliative care services out-of-hours and at weekends. People need someone who is there when it is difficult, when the crises hit. Not to wait, not to be pushed from pillar to post, no answerphones.

“It’s not necessarily about spending more money. It’s about spending it more intelligently and wisely.”

Let’s support the Health Secretary in his mission to fix palliative care.

If the Government is willing re-balance funding priorities to improve access to palliative and end-of-life services, the UK hospice sector is ready and willing to help improve the quality of dying in ways which dovetail with the government tactics of digitisation, prevention and community based solutions.

We urgently need a proper conversation on social and palliative care in this country.

But this Private Member’s Bill is not the way to do it.

This issue is too important to rush through now without considering all the consequences.

Many MPs are understandably hesitant because this will have enormous consequences for our society.

If you are not sure, vote against the Bill, not the conversation.

Voting no to the Assisted Suicide Bill on 29 November should be the start, not the end, of the conversation on end of life in this country.