Assisted-suicide campaigners do not hold the moral high ground

It is now all but certain that British MPs will have a vote on assisted dying before Christmas.

UK prime minister Keir Starmer had previously said that he was ‘personally committed’ to changing the law and was reportedly offering Labour MPs various incentives if they introduced a private members’ bill on the issue. Now, he has finally found a willing vessel in the form of Spen Valley MP Kim Leadbeater. Her bill is expected to enter parliament later this month, with a debate and vote to follow. Should it pass, it would lead to the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide (ASE) for the terminally ill in England and Wales.

Worryingly, Leadbeater doesn’t seem to actually know all that much about the cause she is advocating for. Yesterday, Sky News asked her the obvious question about the potential for a slippery slope. It was put to her that legalising ASE could open some unsavoury doors and lead to all sorts of other groups being offered the so-called right to die – and worse, being pressured by family members or healthcare workers into exercising it. Yet Leadbeater was adamant this was a non-issue. ‘Wherever a law has been introduced in other countries and it’s got strict, limited criteria with proper safeguards and protections, it hasn’t been widened’, she said. ‘So I think there is a perception around the slippery-slope concept, which actually isn’t reality.’

She could not be more wrong. The slippery slope, where assisted suicide is concerned, is very much a reality. Look no further than Canada, where the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) programme has become a byword for dystopian, state-sponsored killing. When the programme was first created in 2016, it was relatively limited in scope, restricted by the kind of safeguards Leadbeater says her bill contains. MAID was intended to be an absolute last resort for people whose suffering was unbearable, and for whom death was imminent.

Today, the situation could not be more different. In 2021, Canada expanded the MAID eligibility criteria to include those with serious and chronic, but not life-threatening, physical conditions. This has created a grim loophole that allows Canadians to treat death as a solution to woes that have nothing to do with terminal illness. Amir Farsoud infamously applied for MAID in 2022 because he was about to be made homeless (he qualified for it on account of his chronic back pain). Fortunately, he didn’t go through with it. But he did manage to receive one of the two doctors’ signatures he needed to proceed.

Canada is also set to expand MAID eligibility even further. In 2027, those suffering from a mental illness, and no other physical condition, will be allowed to apply to be killed. The Netherlands – another country that started out with supposedly sensible, ‘safe’ assisted-dying laws – is already euthanising the mentally ill. Earlier this year, 29-year-old Dutch woman Zoraya ter Beek was approved for euthanasia on the grounds of mental suffering alone. She experienced depression, anxiety and trauma, but was otherwise physically healthy.

This is the fundamental problem with ASE that Leadbeater, Starmer and all those rushing to legalise it don’t understand. There are no amount of safeguards or protections that can prevent assisted-dying laws from spiralling out of control. Once you accept that death is a legitimate treatment for suffering, you cannot logically limit the eligibility to just one group. If a terminal illness is grounds for a doctor to dispatch someone, you must also accept that physical disability is a legitimate reason. And once you include physical suffering, you have to also include mental suffering. And isn’t it unfair to restrict the right to die to those who are capable of reasoning? Why not expand it to children as young as 12 or babies born with severe disabilities, as some have ghoulishly recommended?

We cannot allow the UK to be driven down this dark path. If MPs vote to legalise assisted dying, we will find ourselves not so much sliding down a slippery slope, as falling off a moral precipice.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.