Brits fear Leadbeater Bill will push vulnerable patients to end lives early

There is widespread public concern that removing end-of-life protections will pressurise vulnerable patients to opt for assisted suicide.

In a poll by Savanta, six out of ten adults said they worried that terminally-ill people will feel obliged to seek medical help to die under Kim Leadbeater’s proposals.

The Labour backbench MP’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is due to be debated at the end of this month, and would allow those deemed to be terminally ill and with less than six months to live to receive help to kill themselves.

‘Widespread concern’

Savanta asked 2,206 over-18s in the UK: “To what extent are you concerned or not about terminally ill patients feeling pressured to medically end their life due to costs or inconvenience under the proposed assisted dying bill?”

In response, 25 per cent said they are ‘very concerned’, 36 per cent said they are ‘somewhat concerned’, and 10 per cent answered ‘don’t know’. Only 9 per cent said they are ‘not at all concerned’.

Commenting on the findings, Savanta Associate Director Emma Levin observed: “there continues to be widespread concern that people could be pressured into taking their own life prematurely”.

Danger of coercion

Retired High Court judge Sir James Munby recently warned that Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill promotes a “secret process”, which could prevent the courts from identifying coercion.

Under the Bill, he said that a judge could approve a patient’s request to seek medical help to kill themselves with no input from the patient or their family, and without “the public knowing anything about it – not even the name of the judge”.

Serious reservations about the Bill have also been expressed by Alex Ruck Keene KC, an expert on the Mental Capacity Act and visiting professor at King’s College London.

He said that those who believe it is relatively straightforward to determine whether a person ‘has capacity to make the decision to end their own life’ to be “hopelessly naïve”.