UK lawmakers will consider a bill to legalize assisted dying for the terminally ill, which carries warnings from Church leaders

British lawmakers are set to consider whether to give terminally ill adults the option of ending their own lives with medical assistance, after what proponents say is a shift in public opinion since a similar measure was rejected a decade ago, but with the measure bringing warnings from religious leaders.

Kim Leadbeater, a member of Parliament for Britain’s governing Labor Party who won a vote giving her the right to introduce a bill on an issue of her choosing, said she will introduce an assisted dying bill in October 16, Reuters news agency reported. .

Members of Parliament will vote on the issue in the second reading of the bill, on November 29.

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, however, urged people to write to their lawmakers to oppose the legalization of assisted dying.

The issue was last voted on in 2015, when lawmakers categorically rejected assisted suicide, with 118 votes in favor and 330 against.

As the UK’s highest-ranking Catholic bishop, Nichols urged the faithful to lobby their MPs to oppose proposed changes to the law on assisted dying in England and Wales, warning people: “Be careful with what they want,” The Guardian newspaper reported in October. 12.

In a letter read in churches in his diocese, Cardinal Nichols said the proposed changes risked bringing about “a slow shift from the duty to care to the duty to kill” for medical professionals.

Nichols’ letter says that in countries where assisted dying has been legalized, the circumstances in which it is permitted have been “broadened and expanded.”

He said changing the law could make those close to death feel under pressure to end their lives to relieve family members of a “perceived burden of care”, to avoid pain, or “for a question of inheritance.”

“The radical change in law now proposed risks triggering, for all medical professionals, a slow shift from the duty to care to the duty to kill,” Nichols noted.

DIGNITY IN THE DYING BOSS

Sarah Wootton, chief executive of Dignity in Dying, had, however, said earlier in the year, according to the Guardian: “Assisted dying is a movement whose time has come… People who are dying will hold it to account ; they just do it. I don’t have time to wait.

“As reform approaches in the Isle of Man, Jersey and Scotland, we are on the cusp of historic change in the British Isles.”

Assisted suicide has become a significant problem in the United Kingdom after well-known journalist and television presenter Esther Rantzen, who has terminal cancer, called for a vote on assisted suicide earlier this year, reported Angelus News, a Catholic website in 11 of October.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who personally supports a change in the law, promised Rantzen that he would give MPs a free vote on the issue if he became prime minister, which happened when the Labor Party won the election national general elections on July 4th.

However, a Catholic member of the upper house of Parliament, Lord David Alton, like Cardinal Nichols, warned Starmer that the “floodgates” will open and that vulnerable people will be at risk if the law is passed in the same way as other jurisdictions.

“Before the UK Parliament opens the floodgates of euthanasia,” he said, “it should first impartially consider the results in jurisdictions that have abandoned protecting the vulnerable with ineffective safeguards.

Alton was referring to the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002. Twenty-four confirmed cases of euthanasia have occurred where the individuals concerned have been diagnosed with autism or learning disabilities, Angelus News reported.

In Canada, euthanasia and assisted suicide were legalized in 2016, with the condition that the death of the applicants was “reasonably foreseeable”.

In 2021, this condition was revoked. With a provision to exclude people with mental illnesses set to expire earlier this year in February, lawmakers delayed the expansion of euthanasia and assisted suicide solely on the basis of mental health until March 2027.