By Sarah Young and Elizabeth Piper
LONDON, March 27 (Reuters) – Eighty-year-old Suzie Jee was elated when Britain’s lower house of parliament voted to legalise assisted dying nine months ago. Suffering from incurable bone cancer, she believed that at some point she would be able to make a decision to “slip away”.
Mentally competent, terminally ill adults can end their lives in certain situations in Australia, Canada, some U.S. states, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Spain.
In Britain, however, members of the upper house of parliament said on Friday that the assisted dying proposal would fail at this attempt.
“The Bill does not sufficiently guard against coercion or protect the most vulnerable people in our society,” more than 50 members of the House of Lords said in a letter to lawmakers in the House of Commons lower house of parliament seen by Reuters.
Jee and other campaigners, who had seen this coming, said they felt betrayed.
“Our choice is being swept away from us,” she said.
BRITISH SUPPORT FOR ASSISTED DYING RIGHTS IS NUANCED
Campaigners say polls have long shown around 80% of Britons back assisted dying for those with an incurable and painful illness that will kill them within the next few months, citing the annual British Social Attitudes Survey among other polls.
Those were the circumstances covered by the proposed legislation, which was passed by the lower house in a 314-291 vote. But in the latest version of the Survey last year, 46% of respondents said it should be “definitely allowed”, while the other 33% chose “probably”.
George Freeman, a lawmaker from the opposition Conservative Party, had backed the proposal in 2024 but turned against it in 2025, when the requirement of a High Court judge to sign off on each application was dropped over concerns about the court’s capacity to hear each case.
“I don’t want to live in a country where we’ve inadvertently said to the elderly, the frail, the disabled that taking your own life is to be encouraged,” he said at the time.
Members of the Lords say they proposed amendments to the legislation on advice from professional bodies and medical colleagues but that the bill’s supporters had indicated they would only accept two of the more than 700 already considered.
Asked why, Kim Leadbeater, a member of parliament from the governing Labour Party who sponsored the proposal in a procedure used when an issue is not on the government’s legislative agenda, told Reuters the unelected upper house had overstepped its traditional role of “refining” legislation.
She said the plan had the world’s strongest safeguards – signoff from two doctors and a panel of legal and psychiatric experts.
“The bottom line now is it did pass the elected chamber,” Leadbeater said, describing the Lords’ amendments as sometimes repetitive and occasionally “offensive”, such as that an applicant should not have left the country within the last 12 months to prevent any risk of coercion abroad.
Leadbeater said people should not have to suffer a painful death, take their own lives or resort to legal assisted dying abroad worrying that their relatives could face prosecution.
Those opposing the legislation say proper palliative care would remove any need for them to do that.
“One in four people don’t get their palliative care needs met. That needs to be addressed,” said Gordon Macdonald, CEO of campaign group Care not Killing.
ASSISTED DYING PLAN HAS BROADER POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS
Campaigners for the right to assisted dying say they hope another lawmaker will win the ballot for allotted time to take up the proposal in the next parliamentary session or that the government will back lawmakers in resorting to the rarely used Parliament Act to override the upper house.
“We desperately need this law, so please do something,” cancer sufferer Jee appealed to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, saying that as a former nurse she had seen patients suffer and that her father had taken his own life when he had cancer.
Starmer has voted in favour of assisted dying, but intervening in a decision he has said is up to the consciences of individual members would be politically sensitive.
Local elections are due in May when the populist Reform UK party, whose leader Nigel Farage has opposed the bill, is expected to do well.
“It would look like the government is taking sides,” said Daniel Gover, political lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. “I think that is something that he would want to avoid.”
Asked to comment on the prospects for government intervention, a spokesperson said:
“It is for parliament to decide on any changes to the law.”
(Reporting by Sarah Young and Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Kate Holton and Philippa Fletcher)
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