Watch: Terminally ill Labour MP rails against assisted dying

Terminally ill Labour MP Ashley Dalton delivered a gut-wrenchingly powerful speech in the Commons today, imploring colleagues to vote against the Assisted Dying Bill. Dalton, who has metastatic breast cancer, described how patients with terminal diagnoses are bombarded with terrifying accounts of painful deaths, even as their own agency is overlooked.

The former health minister urged MPs to improve palliative and social care rather than expose some of society’s most vulnerable people to the risk of coercion. With good palliative care, she insisted, ‘death can be gentle’. Dalton told the Commons:

I have been terrorised with tales of people vomiting up their own faeces…it is nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific when with good access to palliative care most deaths are gentle.

The Assisted Dying Bill has returned to the Commons after being revived as a private member’s bill by Labour MP Lauren Edwards. The leader of Catholics in England and Wales, Archbishop Richard Moth, condemned the proposal as ‘wrong in principle’ and ‘deeply flawed’. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, argued that it would signal that ‘we are a society that believes that some lives are not worth living’.

Medical organisations including the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal College of Physicians have also voiced ‘concerns’ about the legislation’s safeguards. Hardly a ringing endorsement from those who would be expected to make the system work.