Why we don’t need another vote on euthanasia

Ethical issues such as abortion and euthanasia are rightly considered matters of personal conscience for MPs at Westminster, so Keir Starmer’s promise of a vote on assisted dying does not automatically mean that Britain will follow Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada in legalising euthanasia, no matter how large a majority Labour might win. When the House of Commons held a similar vote in 2015, it was heavily defeated by 330 votes to 118, though Starmer himself voted in favour.

Nevertheless, we should be concerned about this development. The campaign for assisted dying has recently been energised by the intervention of Esther Rantzen, who is herself terminally ill with lung cancer. She is considering ending her life by travelling to the Swiss clinic Dignitas. There is the danger that the issue of assisted dying will come to be seen purely in terms of the suffering of the terminally ill, without regard to the wider implications or the experience of other countries, where there has often been mission creep.

The US state of Oregon has stuck to its original remit, which was to allow the terminally ill to end their lives. But in other places the story has not been as simple. When Canada legalised assisted dying in 2016, it was solely for the terminally ill – those whose death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’. However, in 2019 a court in Quebec ruled that it was unconstitutional to restrict euthanasia, as a state-provided service, to the terminally ill. As a result, it has been extended to people with chronic conditions, and the numbers of people being euthanised has mushroomed. In 2022, the total had risen to 13,200: 4.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada that year.

Similarly, Belgium started off with 230 assisted deaths a year; now it’s 3,000.