A person’s wish to die can be shaped by whether they have access to proper palliative care – and in England and Wales, too many do not

• Zubir Ahmed is a transplant surgeon and former Labour minister

As a doctor, I have spent much of my professional life caring for people at some of the most vulnerable moments they will ever face. I have seen the anxiety that surrounds the prospect of dying, and the desperate wish of patients and families to avoid unnecessary suffering.

Naturally, we all want people facing the end of life to be treated with kindness and respect. But when considering the debate on assisted dying, true compassion demands that we ask a more fundamental question. What kind of society are we building if, before we’ve fixed the systems designed to care for people, we introduce a system designed to help them die? As a former health minister who has seen the system from the inside, I am able to say it is not ready or equipped to answer this question.

Zubir Ahmed MP is an NHS vascular and transplant surgeon, and served as the parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department of Health and Social Care from 6 September 2025 to 12 May 2026.

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Right to assisted dying established for patients with conditions assessed as incurable and causing unbearable pain

Legislation granting incurably ill adults the right to assisted dying has been formally adopted in France after the text was approved by the country’s highest constitutional authority and published in the official journal.

The law, known as a law on “end of life” or “aid in dying” rather than “assisted dying” or “euthanasia”, means France joins the small group of countries including the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada to have legalised the practice.

Lauren Edwards dismisses party internal concerns and criticises ‘anti-democratic’ way bill was halted

The Labour MP Lauren Edwards who will bring the assisted dying bill back to the Commons has said she will not be dissuaded by concerns about Labour divisions, saying MPs should allow the House of Lords to finish its work on the bill after it was blocked from a vote by peers.

It also can be revealed that the Labour MP and disability rights campaigner Marie Tidball is to co-sponsor the bill, alongside the former minister Alex Davies- Jones.

MP for Rochester and Strood to use private member’s bill to put issue before MPs again after it was blocked by the Lords

The assisted dying bill is set to return to the Commons after the Labour MP Lauren Edwards agreed to use her private member’s bill to put the issue before MPs again.

Edwards said she wanted to give the legislation another chance because it had been blocked by the House of Lords after being passed by MPs. The return of the bill would give supporters a chance to use the Parliament Acts to potentially bypass the Lords if it was blocked for a second time.

Prominent backers including Louise Haigh say they would not support using Parliament Acts to pass bill

Prominent backers of assisted dying, including the former cabinet ministers Louise Haigh, Ian Murray and Jeremy Hunt, have told constituents they do not expect the bill to be resurrected using the Parliament Acts.

A growing number of MPs who backed the bill have suggested to their constituents they do not support the use of the act which allows the potential bypassing of the House of Lords, where peers blocked the bill.

The day I was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, I knew my life would end with euthanasia

I chose to die at 44 because ALS (motor neurone disease) left me paralysed. I still loved my life, even to the last day.

It all started in December 2023, when I lost strength in my right arm, and my pinky finger was going in all directions. I went to see my GP and did physiotherapy because they thought it was a nerve blockage.

Parliament’s failure to change the law on a difficult issue should be the spur to democratic innovation

The prorogation of parliament on Wednesday signals the end of the road for the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill. The proposal to allow some patients in England and Wales, under very specific circumstances, to have medical assistance in ending their own lives was still at committee stage in the Lords when the house rose. Since it was introduced as a private member’s bill, it cannot be carried over into the next session.

Campaigners for assisted dying are furious at what they see as procedural obstruction by unelected peers, bogging the bill down with heaps of amendments and running down the clock, thwarting the will of the elected Commons. Critics of the bill counter that the normal legislative process was followed and that the volume of amendments was a function of poor drafting, leaving practical and ethical problems that had to be addressed in the Lords.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Wendy Duffy died at Pegasos clinic in Basel as assisted dying bill in England and Wales fails to pass

A grieving mother has ended her life at a clinic in Switzerland four years after the death of her only child.

Wendy Duffy, 56, a physically healthy woman, died at the Pegasos clinic in Basel after struggling to cope with the death of her 23-year-old son, Marcus.

Labour’s Kim Leadbeater tells of plan to table identical bill that peers would be unable to stop

MPs and peers who led the assisted dying bill have promised to bring it back to parliament after it ran out of time in the House of Lords.

Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP who tabled the private member’s bill, said the plan would be to table an identical bill in the next parliamentary session, which would prevent peers blocking it again, as the Lords cannot stop the same bill twice.

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Rachel Waters gave morphine to her dying mother to ease her in her final hours. Then came the murder charge

Rachel Waters was in her apartment in Queens, watching food reviews on YouTube, when a nurse called: her mother was dying.

She needed to get to the memory care facility in Evans, Georgia, immediately. A physician had said Marsha could die within hours.

Data shows 209 cases recorded as assisted dying referred to CPS by police between 1 April 2009 and 31 March this year

Thirteen cases of suspected assisted dying are being considered by prosecutors in England and Wales, according to the latest data.

Encouraging or assisting the suicide or attempted suicide of another person is against the law in England and Wales, under the Suicide Act 1961.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Noelia Castillo, 25, a paraplegic, had suffered from psychiatric illness and lived in constant pain

A Spanish woman who spent months fighting her father for the right to euthanasia after being sexually assaulted and becoming paraplegic has finally ended her life on her own terms by means of an assisted death.

Noelia Castillo, 25, had struggled with psychiatric illness since she was a teenager and tried to kill herself in October 2022 after being sexually assaulted. The attempt left her in constant pain and using a wheelchair. Eighteen months later, she used Spain’s euthanasia law, which was introduced in 2021, to secure permission to end her life.

In Spain, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 900 525 100. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie

MSPs reject bill after concerted campaign to block it and despite amendments intended to placate critics

The Scottish parliament has voted against legalising assisted dying after critics and religious groups led a concerted campaign to block the measures.

MSPs voted 69 to 57 to reject the proposals in a late night vote on Tuesday – a larger margin than expected, despite a series of last-minute amendments designed to placate critics of the private member’s bill.

Keir Starmer previously reassured that the war in Iran would not distract the UK from supporting Ukraine

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Letter sent to Starmer claims ‘small number of peers have been using procedural tactics’ to stymie its progress

More than 100 Labour MPs have called on Keir Starmer to stop the House of Lords from blocking the assisted dying bill and give it more time to return to the Commons, with the legislation now certain to fall owing to lack of time.

The private member’s bill, sponsored by Labour’s Kim Leadbeater, will fall when the parliamentary session comes to an end in May because peers have used multiple amendments and lengthy debates to prevent it from being put to a vote.

The philosopher offers a measured and reasonable argument against assisted dying

In this admirably clear and cogent book, the philosopher Kathleen Stock sets out the case against state-sanctioned assisted dying. Her immediate objection is to the end of life bill currently before the House of Lords, but her opposition extends to the principle in general. This is a polemic, but a polite one. Stock says she hopes that by the end of it we will share her objection to the ‘‘institutionalisation of death”.

It is not a popular place to start. Polls over the past few years consistently show that around three-quarters of Britons are in favour of assisted dying for terminally ill people. But Stock has never been afraid of swimming upstream. In 2021, she resigned from the University of Sussex following protests by some staff and students over her views, set out in the book Material Girls, that sex is binary and immutable and that this, rather than gender identity, should be the basis of laws to protect women.

Assembly members voted on Wednesday in favour of the bill, which will need royal assent before it becomes law

Jersey’s parliament has given final approval to a bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults who live on the island.

Members of the States Assembly voted by 32 to 16 on Thursday in favour of the bill, which will now need royal assent before it becomes law.

It was hard to communicate with my mother or father, until reading a book out loud led to a discovery

The novelist Ian McEwan has advocated for the extension of assisted dying to people with dementia, commenting on the deeply distressing experience of his own mother: “By the time my mother was well advanced and could not recognise anyone, she was dead. She was alive and dead all at once. It was a terrible thing. And the burden on those closest is also part of the radioactive damage of it all.”

My mother, Pamela, a journalist, died of vascular dementia 10 years ago. My father, the football journalist and novelist Brian Glanville, died of Parkinson’s last year after living with the illness for five years. He also had a milder form of dementia. “Radioactive damage” is certainly a vivid description of the impact of caring for someone living with a degenerative illness, but the perception that someone in the last stages of dementia may be “dead” feels wrong when I think of my parents. How are you to know what is happening in someone else’s brain?

Exclusive: MPs backing bill to use ‘nuclear option’ of 1911 Parliament Act if it continues to be blocked by Lords

Supporters of assisted dying will seek to force through the bill using an archaic parliamentary procedure if it continues to be blocked by the Lords.

The high stakes move – described by some backers as the “nuclear option” – would be the first time the 1911 Parliament Act has been invoked for a private member’s bill.