Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Friday 20th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dame Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West) (Lab)]

In general, this debate has shown Parliament at its best: informed, considered and passionate. I have not spoken in it before; I have listened, reflected, read, and sought to understand the intention and the impact of the Bill, particularly on the most vulnerable. I will now take five minutes to say four things.

First, I was brought up on the right to die. My mother, who was disabled, often in great pain and a cancer survivor, was a member of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and Exit, as Dignity in Dying was previously called. I can honestly say that Newcastle United, feminism, and the right to die were mother’s milk to me. My position is not based on ideological, cultural or religious reasons.

I urge colleagues not to vote for the Bill, because it is without the rigour or scrutiny necessary to make assisted dying work in practice. I have a great deal of respect for my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater) and the Minister for Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberafan Maesteg (Stephen Kinnock). They have said that the Bill has received more scrutiny than most Government Bills. But this is not your average Bill. It fundamentally changes the relationship between state and citizen. It allows the state to take the life of a citizen. Yes, it is on request, but that is still a huge change.

We say that it is the first duty of any Government to keep our citizens secure. But now the state will also be able to kill them. Our NHS was set up to secure improvement in physical and mental health, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh) has so powerfully argued, the Bill could change the founding principles of the NHS. Clinicians are trained to save lives; now, they will also be able to kill people. The job of our police and armed forces is to protect life and liberty; now, they will also protect those who take people’s lives.

Because this marks a fundamental change in the relationship between state and citizen, it requires much more public and parliamentary debate. We have not even begun to interrogate all the social implications of this change. All of human life is here. It will change the ethos of the NHS. It will enable private companies to kill private citizens. There will be an information campaign so that everyone is aware that the state is able to kill them.

[Paula Barker (Liverpool Wavertree) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Dame Chi Onwurah]

No, I will not take any interventions, thank you.

I particularly fear the impact on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged—those without the social capital of so many arguing for the Bill. There seems to be an assumption that those who have been most unequal in life will suddenly be rendered equal in death, but the least valued by society are often those who value themselves the least. We know that the last year of life is so often the most expensive for the NHS and the most distressing for friends and family; why not save everyone the trouble of being a burden? This Bill lacks the safeguards, which we must have, to deal with the reality that there are powerful economic and personal incentives for both the state and family members to encourage the vulnerable into taking their own lives.

We should specifically consider the impact on ethnic communities: we know the prism of racist assumptions through which healthcare has too often been administered —the huge inequalities in maternal health and mental health, to name just two examples. There is nothing in this Bill to protect the vulnerable and those whose experience of life and death has already been biased.

Finally, to vote against this Bill is not to accept the status quo. It is not our job now to propose a better Bill—that was on Report and at Committee stage—it is our job to judge the Bill as it is, and that is why I say to hon. Members, please, do not vote for this Bill.