2nd reading of Assisted Dying Bill - 11 September 2026

And what method do you propose is a peaceful pain free one? Drug overdose? If you can get the right drugs and right amount how mnay know that. Otherwise whst other options are there.

Next, let's tackle this comparison with veterinary medicine.

In the UK, veterinary medicine is a for-profit model, and it has very little in common with any NHS trust. That means that it is in the vet's financial interest to recommend treatment, no matter how poor the odds, over killing the pet. I am not saying that any particular vet is unethical, merely identifying the directions of pressure, and that from the vet's side, the direction is towards preserving the animal's life.

A vet in private practice does not have any background scruples about wasting public money treating Mr Smith's aged dog that would be better spent treating 10 other dogs, so the vet will only be recommending euthanasia if she or he thinks it is the best interest of that dog on the table. That's how economics works.

In contrast, NHS GPs and hospital doctors are basically bathed in information about the shortfalls in trust budgets, and the importance of cost-effectiveness. The culture of cost-saving already has them pushing DNRs on people with disabilities and the elderly, which I have already described on this thread.

Frankly the comparison is so faulty, that anyone making it reveals that they have not engaged at all with the concerns that the vulnerable will be coerced into death to save state money.

Finally, yes, absolutely tell vets they're killers. The veterinary profession is known for significant rates of mental illness and an unexpectedly high suicide rate, and it is also well known that one of the reasons vets struggle with suicidal ideation is because it's a profession composed of animal-loving academic overachievers continually tasked with killing animals. It has a psychological impact!

Now consider what the psychological impact of killing humans will be on our doctors and nurses, and remember that the committee for this bill voted against an amendment that would have allowed hospices to opt-out of providing assisted suicide.

I don't know but I dare say combining various methods may do the trick.

I also don't think that deaths from assisted suicide are peaceful either.
To be truthful, a bullet to the head would be a more effective solution.
I'm not being graphic for the sake of it, just being realistic.

My main point though is why should everybody else live in a society where death could be foisted upon them by the state just because a few people want access to suicide medication when with a bit of thought they can do it themselves.

Tbf, suicide is not an option for everyone, and does have serious drawbacks; the stigma, insurance and legal issues...

I agree.
Those wanting this (what I believe to be mythical) peaceful death, have no thought about the psychological impact this may have on the medical staff.

They appreciate that the person who may find their body if they commit suicide may be affected but not the doctors and nurses who effectively have to carry out the procedure.

It's really unnatural for a person to take another person's life.
They either do it as they've snapped through years of abuse, are psychopathic/sociopathic or been brainwashed into it.

I don't think they've thought for one second how this may affect the medical staff.
What kind of person would want to be tasked with making a judgement on a person's life, anyway?
I think it would attract those with a degree of psychopathy.

The more I think about it the more I'm convinced it is the pro-assisted dying group who are the selfish ones.

The point about insurance is interesting.
One I'm not even sure has been addressed.

Suicide is suicide no matter who gives out the pills.

The insurance companies are not charities after all.

Except the bill was for people to administer the medicine themselves the assisted bit is getting the right medication and giving it to the person. Hence why its called assisted.

This is just splitting hairs.
There would still be people making decisions as to whether or not they should have it.

(Who do you think would want this role? The least suited to it. That's who.
The psychopathic, those with some kind of a God complex.)

The medical staff would still have to fetch it and put it in their hands.

This 'they'd have to take it themselves' is really splitting hairs and everybody can see through it for the farce it is.

I'm not going to mince my words. If people want to commit suicide, ultimately that's up to them, I do not judge but to expect the rest of society to change for them is not acceptable.

There's a well known celebrity at the moment who is really getting on my wick about this who has had plenty of opportunity, time and cash to go to Dignitas but has not.

Someone in the final stages of some diseases; Huntington's, motor neuron disease, probably others, may not be able to swallow. Someone will either have to administer the drugs through a tube or inject them.

I'm prepared to get telt but I don't understand how somebody with money can be too frail to travel to Digitas. Stephen Hawkins travelled all over the world possibly including Epstein island while being by any metric extremely frail. I'm hoping that they've discovered that their final days aren't as unbearable as they thought but doesn't wish to publically back track.

It's splitting hairs in a way that hairs are never split in any other context in healthcare. Responsibility remains with the staff member who dispenses the medication. This is basic.

If Nurse Smith or care worker Geraldine gives the wrong medication, or the right medication at the wrong time, or two tablets instead of one, it means absolutely nothing that Mrs Baker physically took the tablets herself without having them spooned into her mouth. If Mrs Baker suffers ill-health, it is Nurse Smith/ care worker Geraldine's responsibility for the medication error.

Moving article from a disabled feminist activist I follow on Substack, Lucy Webster. She's done a lot on the dangers of the bill.

https://lucywebster.substack.com/p/activism-works

So that already happens today, wrong medication given etc. So safeguards today aren't robust enough are they. For those who like to argue at least we have safeguards today.

You already did the "world's not perfect, so let's kill more people" argument. Mistakes in healthcare happen and it is our job as human beings with a duty of care to learn from previous errors and to put processes in place to prevent repeats

You sound like a dieter who realises he's gone over his calorie goal for the day by 150 calories, and then goes on a three-day binge of 5000 extra calories "because the diet's ruined anyway". It's an incredibly unhealthy way to deal with the world, and it is absolutely not acceptable to inflict your flawed reasoning on other people.

That means that if you realise, "oh, Nurse Jones accidentally gave a patient the wrong tablet yesterday and that means the ward's clean sheet for meds errors is lost for September", you shouldn't set out to deliberately poison 10 other people before the sheet reset on October 1st.

In all seriousness, have you spoken to anyone about your nihilism? Or your beliefs that anything less than perfection is worthless?

Advocating for end-of-life choice isn't 'nihilism,' and trying to psychoanalyze me because I have a firm view is just pathetic. My life is meaningful, which is exactly why I believe people should have a say in how it ends. Telling me I'm 'inflicting my views' while you actively support a law that forces your views on everyone else is massive hypocrisy.

Life is meaningful no matter how long you live it.

There's also an interesting ethical question over refusal of treatment because the treatment is risky. For example, someone at risk of choking, so "nil by mouth", may be considered for a PEG. But that requires an operation, and the patient is at risk of dying. So the PEG is rejected as a treatment, and the patient declines over three or four weeks and then dies anyway. I have seen this situation, and it made little sense to me. But the hospital staff couldn't take the risk of being accused of recklessly endangering the patient's life. What is the most ethical action? I don't know.

Your 'firm view' has led you to claiming that current rates of medication errors (many of which don't even have harmful results) mean it doesn't matter if future, additional patients are coerced into death.

If it's not nihilistic, what is it?

If you truly believe life is meaningful, start from a position that you are not allowed to bargain away other people's lives in exchange for state assistance with your death. You would be better doing that in any case, as you would be more likely to get somewhere.

I’m on a discussion forum to share a viewpoint, not to run a campaign. I don't need to 'get anywhere.'
You want to talk about bargaining away lives? The opposite of that is bodily autonomy and human dignity. The current law literally forces dying people to suffer at all costs just to satisfy someone else's moral checklist.

There's a well known celebrity at the moment who is really getting on my wick about this who has had plenty of opportunity, time and cash to go to Dignitas but has not.

I have been surprised by Rantzen given her career in helping the vulnerable, the coerced and particularly the elderly with The Silver Line, that she doesn’t see any potential problems.

Life is full of suffering and is inherently unfair. It's not possible, nor reasonable, for the law to take away individual suffering. The law exists to uphold rights.

There is a right to life. There is no right to kill yourself with someone else's help.

Not in my view! All our molecules will go on to do other stuff once we die. Some of them will become parts of other living things. It's not like anything goes anywhere.

A workplace first aider cannot give me paracetamol for a migraine if I've forgotten mine, because that's legally classed as "prescribing". You don't get to claim that medics aren't responsible for what a patient takes just because the patient puts the medicine in their own mouth.

Hear, hear, Sonia.

You won't be aware of it though.

It doesn't comfort me any to know that I am breathing air containing molecules that were previously part of CatOfHate.

A lot of dishonest language in this post.

First of all, non-human animals are not "put to sleep". They are killed - albeit for what we take it upon ourselves to consider "good" reasons (and often these reasons involve our own convenience and comfort and even finances). We can debate about whether this a morally acceptable practice, but let's call a spade a spade. However, non-human animals typically have no say in the matter, unlike the many human animals who explicitly desire and ask to be euthanised.

"Humans are not the same as animals." No comparison is necessary, because humans ARE animals. Consult any serious biology textbook or dictionary. That false dichotomy does damage to both non-human and human animals (though more so the former). The real difference is that we have the power - derived largely from technology and from our numbers.

"I love animals but we don't treat them as ethically or legally the same." That's deriving an "ought" from an "is". Various classes of human animals have been, and continue to be, treated as not ethically or legally "the same", i.e., inferior, including the entire female sex class in many parts of the world today. Society upholds all sorts of legal fictions - generally convenient to those in power. But people cannot change their sex, no matter the laws or the ethical arguments. And humans ARE animals.

It's scary to me how many people cannot comprehend basic biological truths. And how many people have such a need to hold themselves superior to other animals. It seems some people must always find some type of being to feel superior to...

1. Humans are mammals. Most mammals treat conspecifics differently from other animals, particularly in respect of food. Cats don't usually regard other cats as dinner. In treating each other differently, with higher regard, from other animals, humans are acting like most other mammals. We aren't being unreasonable with this behaviour.
2. Humans are smarter than other animals. Yes, we've seen startling examples of animal intelligence in unexpected species (the piano-playing octopus), but they aren't designing the Sydney Harbour Bridge. When we choose to take responsibility for caring for a non-human animal, we make decisions within the law for that animal, just as we would for a small child.

From those two, all else follows: housing CatOfHate, taking him for medical exams when he didn't want to be taken there, treating him for worms (he hated that too), and finally arranging for a qualified professional to kill him as quickly and kindly as possible when he developed metatastic lung cancer. All reasonable actions to take for a creature who cannot make his own informed decisions, who is legally and morally of a lesser status than a human, and who I had a duty of care towards.

The only one of those things you wouldn't also do for a small child is the killing, and that's because, like most other mammals, we hesitate to kill conspecifics in a way that we don't with non-conspecifics.

Non-human animals endure considerable harm because of how humans treat them, sometimes with good cause and sometimes not. The legal principle that killing non-human animals is sometimes OK allows for the poisoning and killing of rats (a necessary evil for public health), the gassing of day-old male chicks by egg farms (harder to justify), and the euthanasia of a beloved pet (very easy to justify, people would call me cruel if I hadn't done that)

Extending that principle to people will result in harm to at least some people, just as it already causes harm to many non-human animals. That so many informed stakeholders objected indicates that the harm would have been widespread and substantial.