"Mercy" killing

Several countries, among them Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, and now also some of the more "progressive" American states, have adopted "medically assisted suicide." But not, so far, Great Britain. "How Britain Escaped Assisted Suicide" explains some of the reasons, and they are good reasons:

In June 2025 Janet Daby, the Member of Parliament for Lewisham East, started having nightmares: terrible images of death and dying that disturbed her sleep and haunted her conscience. She didn’t need a psychotherapist to interpret them. That month she had joined 313 other MPs in voting through an assisted suicide bill. She was beginning to think she might have made the wrong choice, and the 291 MPs on the other side might have made the right one.

There was one conversation that added to Daby’s doubts: someone she knew who had HIV and AIDS, and who many years before, with a bleak prognosis, had wished for the swift exit of an assisted death; but who had since found the right drugs, and made a decent life for himself. The kind of person who might be swallowed up by a state suicide service before he or she had the chance to find help. That was the kind of person she had endangered with her vote. And now it was too late.

But the British constitution, like life, sometimes gives you a second chance. ....

A lot of people assumed that the Lords (who are appointed, not elected) would have to wave through a bill of such importance, given that elected representatives had approved it. The Lords themselves were less persuadable.

And as they examined the bill, over a long period in late 2025 and early 2026, they began to uncover the same kind of problems as Janet Daby. The Royal College of Psychiatrists pointed out, to a committee convened by the Lords, that if people were depressed, the state would help them kill themselves—without asking too many questions about what help they needed. Experts in coercion observed that if people were being psychologically terrorized by an abusive partner, the state would help them kill themselves. One organization after another pointed out that if people fell through the gaps in Britain’s rickety health and care system, the state would help them kill themselves. ....

What swung the result? Perhaps less one issue than a steady accumulation of doubts. Hospices and care homes might be closed or defunded—this was explicitly threatened by one of the main proponents of the bill. Disabled people would come under pressure. People would die because the health system had failed them. The high costs of care would provide a powerful incentive for death. .... (more)

Dan Hitchens, "How Britain Escaped Assisted Suicide," First Things, Sept. 11, 2026.