A recent poll has found over 50 per cent of the British public support legalising assisted dying but believe there are too many “complicating factors” for it to be safely implemented in the UK.
The survey of more than 2,000 British adults found 56 per cent fear the practice could lead to a culture of normalising suicide, while nearly half (47 per cent) worry people might choose it because they feel like they’re a burden on their families.
Commissioned by the Christian charity Living and Dying Well, the data comes ahead of an attempt to change the law on the practice in the House of Lords.
The Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults Bill, which would allow terminally ill adults with six months or fewer to live to get medical help to end their lives has been introduced by former Labour Justice Secretary Lord Falconer. The bill includes strict safeguards including assessments by two independent doctors and self-administration of the life-ending medication.
Speaking to Premier Christian News, Alistair Thompson from Care Not Killing raises concerns over safeguarding issues and the pressures vulnerable people could experience under the proposed law.
“It’s not just real pressure but also perceived pressure, it’s not difficult to imagine an elderly person who might not be in the best of health who thinks that they are consuming their children’s and grandchildren’s inheritance by having to pay for expensive healthcare and ot getting any help from the state and that they think their better off dead.”
Thompson pointed out that in countries where assisted dying is legal, more than half of those who choose it do so out of fear of becoming a burden on their families, caregivers, or finances. He argued that modern pain management should eliminate the need for assisted dying due to suffering and stressed the importance of providing effective and accessible palliative care.
“With modern drugs there is no reason why people should be experiencing pain.
“When palliative care, which is done in many places in the UK exceptionally well, is delivered we don’t have these sorts of problems and issues. But where it is done badly and where people can’t access it we encounter problems.
Quoting the 2024 Health and Social Care Committee report on assisted dying, Thompson highlighted the need to fix the UK's "broken palliative care system," noting that one in four people who would benefit from such care do not currently receive it.
The poll also revealed that 70 percent of respondents believe assisted dying laws in other countries, where non-terminally ill young people have been euthanised, have "gone too far."
Additionally, more than three-quarters (77 percent) of those surveyed supported the right of doctors, healthcare workers, and hospices to conscientiously object to participating in assisted dying.
Tanni, The Baroness Grey-Thompson DBE, chair of LDW, said: “This nationally representative poll conducted under British Polling Council guidelines gives a very different snapshot of ordinary peoples’ attitude towards assisted suicide than the glossy picture presented by pro AD/AS organisations. It shows that, at best, people are ambivalent about the prospect. And the survey shows that the more people know about the issue, the more likely they are to reject this legislation.”
