A former minister who has stage 4 incurable breast cancer has made an impassioned plea against assisted dying, telling MPs that it would be “nothing short of irresponsible” to pass the legislation.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has returned to Parliament, after running out of time earlier this year.
Ashley Dalton, the Labour MP for West Lancashire, who resigned from her post as a health minister earlier this year while she continues to undergo chemotherapy, urged colleagues to vote against the bill, giving a harrowing account of her experience of receiving a terminal diagnosis.
“The last time this House considered this bill at second reading, I was keeping a secret”, Ms Dalton said. “Whilst honourable and right honourable members were debating the issue, I was grappling with my own terminal diagnosis.
“I was told I have stage four incurable metastatic breast cancer. I was overwhelmed with grief, fear, and anxiety. I was scared of what was to come, and I was fearful of how it would impact my family and my loved ones.
“I was scared that I was going to get really poorly, and thinking, how will I cope? How will my family cope? How will I be cared for? How will I afford it? How badly will it hurt? How long will it last?
“When you hear those words, depression, anxiety, grief, fear, shame, and guilt come in bounds. Suicide risk is highest immediately after diagnosis, and it usually falls quickly within three to six months.”
She argued that this bill “makes no provision to support this difficult transition or to create safeguards around it”, warning that an individual can “also be suicidal and have unmet mental health needs prior to developing a terminal illness, and then ask the state to kill them, without any assessment of their psychological health, just their mental capacity”.
“I would be lying if I said that when thinking about all that was to come, I didn’t consider that it might just be fairer and easier on everyone if I just got the dying over with as soon as possible”, she said.
“Having treatable depression, however, will not exclude anyone from an assisted death within this bill, and depression is common among people with terminal illness. But it is often treatable.”
The Bill would allow adults in England and Wales, with fewer than six months to live, to apply for an assisted death subject to the approval of two doctors and an expert panel.
But Ms Dalton argued that it is extremely difficult to assess how long someone has left to live.
“I don’t know how long I will live. I will be on treatment for life, however long or short that may be. I, at the moment, live between scans in nine to 12 week blocks of time. The last scan may show the disease is stable, but the next scan might show that it is growing again. If the disease is stable, the drug’s working, and we can carry on.
“Eventually, the drug will stop working, the cancer will grow, and we’ll have to try another drug and see if that works. At some point, we’ll either run out of drugs to try, or I’ll be too poorly to tolerate them. Then I die. It could be months. It could be years. No one really knows. Prognosis is notoriously difficult to predict.”
Ms Dalton also claimed that people with terminal diagnoses have been “scaremongered” into “believing our deaths will be horrific”.
“The idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false. People have been terrorized with tales of people vomiting up their own feces as though this is commonplace during death. It is vanishingly rare, and you know, bowel obstructions are more common, but they are treatable. I know. I’ve had one.
“It’s nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific, when all the evidence suggests that with access to good palliative care, deaths are on the whole gentle”, she said.
Closing out her emotional intervention, Ms Dalton told the Commons: “My days may be numbered, but that doesn’t mean that I want this chamber to rush through bad law just so I might have a chance to see it or use it. It’s of huge importance.
“If honourable and right honourable members have any doubt that the exact bill before us today is not the best it could be, is anything less than excellent, well thought out, and robustly drafted legislation that protects the vulnerable and recognises the expertise of our world-class clinicians, and a bill that I and other terminally ill people deserve, then I urge them to vote no or vote abstain.”
Lauren Edwards, the MP who has re-introduced the Bill to the Commons, taking over from its previous sponsor Kim Leadbeater, has urged her fellow MPs to send the near-identical Bill back to the Lords “so that they can finish what they started” in scrutinising the legislation.
The Bill’s fall in the Lords in April prompted claims of a “denial of democracy” from supporters who criticised some peers for tabling hundreds of amendments and effectively talking the legislation out.
Ms Edwards said MPs on Friday were being asked to consider “who ultimately decides the laws that govern our nations” – a reference to the fact the Lords is an unelected chamber.
Ahead of the debate around 70 MPs had put their names forward to speak on the Bill – with the chamber’s green benches almost full – and a vote is expected to take place by 2.30pm.
While the Bill passed two votes in the Commons in 2024 and 2025, the second vote saw the majority in favour of the Bill narrow to 23 from 55.
