Press Statement – Hospices to be Forced to Provide Assisted Suicide

On Friday 16 May the House of Commons began the Report Stage of Kim Leadbeater MP’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. After a day of debate Parliament voted by 279 to 243 against an amendment that would have protected hospices and other organisations from having to provide assisted suicide on their premises. Without this amendment, clauses in the rest of the Bill would allow doctors to raise the issue proactively with patients, and to provide patients with lethal drugs, and be present with patients when they took these drugs, all within the walls of a Catholic hospice or nursing home. Voluntary aided hospices would have no legal way to avoid becoming suicide clinics. Catholic patients would have no safe haven where they could receive palliative care without the threat of being offered assistance in suicide. 

Stephen Kinnock MP, who is strongly in favour of the Bill but was speaking for the Government as Minister of State at the Department of Health and Social Care, implied that the amendment was unworkable. He stated that it was ‘not clear how the amendment will work with the protection for employees from detriment’ and that, if organisations could opt out ‘the service might not be available or could be much more difficult to access.’

However, the amendment is clear. It would simply allow organisations to have policies on this issue, as they have policies on other matters, and to enforce these policies subject to existing employment law. In relation to preventing assisted suicide from being accessed, the Bill itself is unclear how ‘Voluntary Assisted Dying’ Services would operate in practice, but surely it could be implemented without forcing hospices to deliver it.

That protection for organisations is workable in practice is shown by the fact that all ten jurisdictions in the United States with comparable laws of assisted suicide include protection for organisations such as hospices from having to participate. In Oregon such institutional protections have been in place for over 25 years.

Professor David Albert Jones, Director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, said:

‘In the Leadbeater Bill, providing assistance in suicide is now termed “Voluntary Assisted Dying”, but this vote means that the practice might not be ‘voluntary’ for Catholic organisations. Hospices could be compelled to provide assistance in suicide or forced to close. This Bill not only threatens the right to life of vulnerable patients, it threatens freedom of conscience and freedom of religion.’

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Notes to Editors:

• Any part of the above can be quoted as coming from our Director, Professor David Albert Jones.
• For more information, please see the Centre’s full Guide on ‘Assisted Dying’ (euthanasia and assisted suicide) which includes a guide to the latest evidence concerning EAS internationally, the Centre’s series of briefing papers on EAS since 2021, and videos on subjects relating to EAS.
• If the issues discussed here affect you or someone close to you, you can call Samaritans on 116 123 (UK and ROI), visit their website or contact them on: jo@samaritans.org
• If you are reporting or writing about a case of death by suicide, whether assisted or non-assisted, please consult the Samaritans’ media guidelines on how to do so responsibly.
• For more information on the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, see our website: www.bioethics.org.uk
• For interviews or comment, contact: media@bioethics.org.uk