Disability campaigners call for delay to assisted suicide bill

An open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham from disability rights group Assist Us To Live has urged him to fix social and hospice care before considering assisted suicide legislation in Parliament.

The letter calls for “a halt to the legislative process around assisted dying until disabled and terminally ill people have as much support to live as this bill would provide for us to die.” They argue that the safest course of action is to “reform the social and palliative care systems before any move is made towards a programme of assisted suicide.”

Assist Us To Live is a new disability rights group founded by key voices in the disability rights movement in the UK, and supported by prominent disabled people in the arts, media, and academia, such as comedian Rosie Jones, actors Liz Carr and Ruth Madeley, and TV presenter Sophie Morgan.

MP Lauren Edwards’ assisted suicide Bill is due for its second reading in the House of Commons on 11th September. It is a reintroduction of the Ter­min­ally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill put forward by Kim Leadbeater in the last session of Parliament, which was passed by the Commons by only 23 votes, but ran out of time in the House of Lords.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said that “fixing of the funding of palliative care and social care” needs to come before a debate on assisted suicide. He has not said that he will stop the passage of Edwards’ Bill, but it appears unlikely the government will give it official support.

The open letter addresses the Prime Minister directly, saying that “disabled people’s lives have been consistently devalued, and we still experience this in the present on a daily basis. We are constantly fed the narrative that we are burdens, benefit scroungers and that it’s better to be dead than disabled.”

They argue that the assisted suicide legislation puts sick and disabled people’s lives at risk, and ask that Burnham votes no to the upcoming Bill. They also call for the government to fully fund palliative care, abolish the social care savings threshold, equalise pay between the NHS and social care, and form a taskforce on independent and supported living for sick and disabled people.

“No one wants any terminally ill person to suffer unnecessarily at death,” they write, “But we must protect the lives and rights of disabled and terminally ill people in life.”