Ten myths about assisted suicide

Today, a bill hoping to legalise ‘assisted dying’ for the terminally ill in England and Wales was formally introduced to parliament. It is due to be debated in the House of Commons at the end of next month. Although it is a private members bill, put forward by backbench Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, prime minister Keir Starmer says he is committed to allowing a vote on the issue.

If the parliamentary debate is anything like the one that’s been happening elsewhere, this doesn’t bode well. Discussion around assisted suicide and euthanasia (ASE) is dominated by emotional pleas, logical inconsistencies and outright myths. Here are 10 of the most egregious:

1) The British people overwhelmingly support ASE

The support rate for ASE, we have been told over the years, is ‘more than 90 per cent’. The assisted-dying movement leans heavily on a supposedly supportive public to justify itself.

However, support has cooled as of late. More in-depth polling shows that British people are actually deeply ambivalent about legalising ASE. A poll commissioned earlier this year by the group Living and Dying Well found that legalisation came 22nd out of 23 issues in terms of importance to voters, only beating ‘regional devolution’. It also showed that, out of 54 per cent of those who gave an opinion on ASE (nearly a fifth of respondents put ‘don’t know’), most respondents favoured it in principle but didn’t think it was safe or practical.

An even more recent poll this month found that, while 63 per cent of British people favour legalising assisted dying, less than half (45 per cent) want their MP to vote for the law. A majority also say they don’t know enough about how it would work in practice to support a change in the law. Even a poll commissioned by pro-ASE campaign group Dignity in Dying this year found that fewer than half of all Britons wanted their MP to vote for ASE.

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