Before voting on assisted dying today, I urge MPs to remember the definition of insanity.

IIt is often said that insanity is trying to do the same thing but expecting a different result. It would be reasonable to apply this maxim to today’s debate in Parliament about whether to legalize assisted suicide.

When MPs last voted on the issue in 2015, the idea was decisively rejected by 330 votes to 118. This result cannot be explained simply by the political composition of Parliament at the time: more Labor MPs voted against than for legalization, as did more MPs -Conservatives and Liberal Democrat MPs were evenly divided.

The 2015 vote was sandwiched between two other “once-in-a-generation” decisions: the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and the 2016 Brexit referendum. However, it is not entirely clear why another vote was held less than ten years later. required solely in relation to assisted suicide – especially given that the result on this issue was much more conclusive than the results of the two referendums.

This becomes even more puzzling when you consider that the reasons for refusing legalization are now more compelling than in 2015, in light of what has happened elsewhere in the intervening years.

In 2016, a year after the House of Commons vote, Canada legalized assisted dying for the terminally ill or people whose death was “reasonably foreseeable.” Canadian MPs were warned about the expansion and abuse of similar laws in the Netherlands and Belgium, but convinced themselves they would be better off and could safely implement assisted death.

Yet just five years later, in 2021, Canada extended the Medical Assistance in Dying (Maid) program to the terminally ill, while people with mental illness are due to be able to die under this scheme from 2027. Made became so normalized that she became a Paralympian. Christine Gauthier said she was offered it without prompting after she applied to have a stair lift installed in her home.

Not to be outdone by Canada, the Netherlands and Belgium have also continued to pursue an ever-increasing expansion of their assisted dying practices. “Couple euthanasia,” a forced prescription, is on the rise in the Netherlands: 66 people died this way last year; The country also agreed last year to extend the law to children of all ages, and its parliament is soon expected to consider allowing anyone over 75 to apply for state-assisted death, even if they are completely healthy.

In 2016, a year after the House of Commons rejected assisted suicide, Belgium saw its first minor die under its assisted dying laws, and last year 48 people there were provided with assisted dying. psychiatric diseases.

Aware of the bad PR that Canada, the Netherlands and Belgium provide for their cause, campaigners often point to the US state of Oregon as an example of the kind of legislation they would like to see passed here. However, in 2017, the Oregon Health Authority, calling its law a “permissive law,” announced that its definition of terminal illness (a prerequisite for assisted suicide in the state) included any disease that could lead to death. without treatment, not those that cannot be cured With care.

This has since led to assisted suicides by people suffering from anorexia and diabetes. Last year, Oregon also eliminated its residency requirement, opening the door to so-called suicide tourism.

These are not outcasts. Canada and Oregon are part of the Anglosphere, and the Netherlands and Belgium are our two closest neighbors. However, none of these places have escaped the expansion and abuses that local advocates have sought to downplay.

Having tried and failed to hold up Oregon as a role model, proponents of legal change now seem to be pointing instead to Australia and New Zealand, where legalization is so recent that no clear lessons can be learned. Despite this, the bill before Parliament does not include the same level of mandatory reporting for assisted dying required in those countries’ jurisdictions, increasing the likelihood that cases of abuse will go undetected.

It is not only the international experience of passing laws on assisted suicide that should give MPs pause now than they did nine years ago. As Health Secretary Wes Streeting has noted, the current state of our NHS, which is still recovering from the Covid pandemic, and increased pressure on palliative care and hospices means that our public services are not in a position to consider introducing a Death Act that could lead to vulnerable people feeling that they are “obligated to die.”

If MPs had good reasons to reject assisted suicide in 2015, they have even more reasons to do so now. What proponents of legalization are proposing is not something untested and untested, but a change in the law whose consequences can be clearly seen elsewhere—and the lessons are troubling. Suggestions that there will be a push to expand assisted suicide laws are not speculative either: campaigners are already lobbying for a more liberal law.

In other countries, assisted suicide laws have put vulnerable people at risk and sent the message that the lives of the elderly, terminally ill, disabled people and people with mental health problems are not worth living. If MPs voted for such changes here in the UK, it would change society not for the better, but for the worse. Parliament overwhelmingly rejected legalization nine years ago, but changing course now, given what has happened over the years, would be nothing short of madness.

Baroness Gray-Thompson is a former Paralympian.