Ethical issues such as abortion and euthanasia are rightly considered matters of personal conscience for MPs at Westminster, so Keir Starmer’s promise of a vote on assisted dying does not automatically mean that Britain will follow Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada in legalising euthanasia, no matter how large a majority Labour might win. When the House of Commons held a similar vote in 2015, it was heavily defeated by 330 votes to 118, though Starmer himself voted in favour.

Nevertheless, we should be concerned about this development. The campaign for assisted dying has recently been energised by the intervention of Esther Rantzen, who is herself terminally ill with lung cancer. She is considering ending her life by travelling to the Swiss clinic Dignitas. There is the danger that the issue of assisted dying will come to be seen purely in terms of the suffering of the terminally ill, without regard to the wider implications or the experience of other countries, where there has often been mission creep.

Euthanasia brings about a fundamental devaluation of human life

The US state of Oregon has stuck to its original remit, which was to allow the terminally ill to end their lives. But in other places the story has not been as simple. When Canada legalised assisted dying in 2016, it was solely for the terminally ill – those whose death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’. However, in 2019 a court in Quebec ruled that it was unconstitutional to restrict euthanasia, as a state-provided service, to the terminally ill. As a result, it has been extended to people with chronic conditions, and the numbers of people being euthanised has mushroomed. In 2022, the total had risen to 13,200: 4.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada that year.

Similarly, Belgium started off with 230 assisted deaths a year; now it’s 3,000. Just under two years ago, 23-year-old Shanti De Corte, a survivor of the Islamic terror attack on Brussels airport in 2016, was euthanised in a clinic in Belgium after suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She had received no physical injuries herself but had seen some of her friends die in the blast and had not been able to recover from the experience.

There is evidence that many people opting to end their lives prematurely are choosing to do so for reasons beyond their own personal suffering: a survey revealed that a third were doing so at least in part because they perceived themselves to be a ‘burden’ on their family, friends or on society. From what was an option available to people in their last, most miserable days of life – when all hope of recovery is gone and only pain and suffering lie ahead – we now have a situation in which people with chronic illnesses and disabilities are subtly invited to view their lives as not worthwhile. In this way, euthanasia brings about a fundamental devaluation of human life.

The same thing happened with abortion when it was legalised in Britain in 1967. At first it was intended as a measure to be carried out in extremis, when to carry on with a pregnancy risked serious physical or mental harm to the mother. Yet without any further substantial change to the law, we have arrived at a situation in which abortion is used to end one in four pregnancies; and the concept of ‘mental harm’ has come to be interpreted as any kind of inconvenience. That is not what the architects of the 1967 Act had in mind.

A prohibition against assisted dying does not, of course, prevent people from taking their own lives. The state cannot seek to prevent everyone who might possibly be in danger of committing suicide from doing so. But to enable assisted dying could take us down a very dark path. Potentially it would legitimise the idea of suicide in the minds of people who might be vulnerable.

There is no absolute line between palliative care and assisted dying. Every day, terminally ill patients in Britain are administered drugs that could hasten their death – the practice is legal so long as the principal aim is to alleviate suffering. Yet there is a big difference between what currently happens in end-of-life care and a law formally to allow euthanasia. The fact that other countries have gone down this route does not make it inevitable that we have to. On the contrary, what is going on in countries that have already passed such a law is far from enlightened – it is deeply disturbing.

The campaign for assisted dying may focus at present on terminally ill people who are desperate to avoid suffering at the end of their lives; but there is a very real danger that it could come to be seen as the duty of anyone who thinks their continued existence may be a burden on others. The current guidelines in Britain were set by Starmer when he was director of Public Prosecutions. There is no need for them to be reformed.