London: British lawmakers look set to hold a fresh debate on legalising assisted dying for terminally ill people in the new parliamentary session, after one member said she would reintroduce draft legislation that stalled earlier this year.
Polls have long shown around 80% of Britons back assisted dying, and the country had been on course to follow Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and Spain as well as some U.S. states in permitting it, until the bill faltered in the upper chamber.
Lauren Edwards, a lawmaker in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, said she would bring back the same legislation as a private member’s bill to the House of Commons, the lower chamber of parliament.
Writing on her website on Sunday, Edwards said she owed it to terminally ill people and their families to bring back a bill that gives them choice at the end of their lives. In 2025, elected members of the House of Commons voted in favour of changing the law by 314-291, but the bill failed in the unelected upper chamber, the House of Lords, in March after members ran out of time to debate the hundreds of amendments proposed during that parliamentary session.
“We cannot allow an unelected minority to frustrate the democratic process for a second time,” Edwards said, adding that what had happened undermined public trust in democracy because it stopped the government from implementing changes supported by the majority of voters.
Under the proposed bill, mentally competent, terminally ill adults in England and Wales with six months or fewer to live would be given the right to end their lives with medical help, after approval from a panel of professionals.
Concerns from some members of the House of Lords about the bill’s ability to protect vulnerable ill people from coercion led to the high number of amendments being put forward.
Edwards said the proposed assisted dying law was “the safest and most robust” in the world.
(Reporting by Sarah Young, editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)
