Salvation Army urges MPs to vote against assisted suicide

The Salvation Army is warning that the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill contains fundamental flaws that could put vulnerable people at risk and urges MPs to vote against it at the Second Reading.

Territorial Leader of The Salvation Army in the UK and Ireland, Commissioner Paul Main said: 

“While the formal Salvation Army position is to stand against assisting suicide, there is one point on which all sides of the debate agrees: everyone should have the chance of a dignified death. We are gravely concerned that the bill is weighted in favour of those with better access to care, health resources and support networks. 

"In particular, the Bill does not properly protect vulnerable people from coercion and there are no proper safeguards to check one’s capacity to make informed decisions about their final days. 

“The Salvation Army believes that the only way to give people the best chance of a dignified death is to help people to live a dignified life. This means proper support for those living in acute poverty, battling addiction and mental health issues or living with chronic life limiting conditions. It is difficult to make a clear-eyed decision about death when your daily living is such a struggle.

“Local Authority budgets are especially stretched, forcing care to be increasingly focused on basic needs such as feeding, bathing and dressing, rather than on the meaningful activities that for many people make life worth living.

“There must be proper funding of palliative care to ensure individuals receive physical, emotional, and spiritual support.  

“Government figures show that Hospices in the UK receive about a third of their funding from the state. If this Bill passes into law we would be in the strange position of assisted suicide being fully funded by the state, but hospice care relying on voluntary donations for over 60% of its funding. 

“Our focus must be on allowing people to live life to the full, especially for those who do not have the means to access some of the very basics in life that we take for granted.”

In particular, The Salvation Army identified fundamental flaws in the following areas in the bill.

Establishing mental capacity

The Bill rightly makes provision for a specialist assessment of a person’s capacity to make a decision about ending their life but we know through our work that this is not always a straightforward process. It can be a costly and time-consuming process for statutory bodies which are already under pressure which could lead to life and death decisions being made in what others assume to be a person’s best interests. 

Choice is not equitable 

It is a mockery of human dignity to talk about giving people choices in dying while they are denied choices in living. 

People living in poverty or with limited medical access are less likely to have access to palliative care, specialist medical help and other support networks that can relieve physical and emotional pain at the end of their lives. Under these intense pressures, they could feel it is better to die than live without much needed support and care. 

The Bill does not require a person seeking assisted suicide to be in any particular pain or suffering: but merely to have a terminal condition which is likely to produce death within six months. We fear that this opens the door to people seeking assisted suicide for reasons which are connected to social exclusion and poverty. 

For example, in Canada over 80% of people requesting Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in 2022 gave ‘loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities’ as a reason for their request. 

Protection from coercion

The Bill would make it an offence to induce somebody to seek assisted dying ‘by dishonesty, coercion or pressure’. But coercion or pressure are not defined in the Bill and in any case, this would only deal with *individual* coercion or pressure. 

Wider issues of what might be called social coercion — for example, because of limited resources as mentioned above, or from social or family expectations not to ‘be a burden’ in terminal illness, are not addressed. We do not want people to feel guilty because they have chosen not to die prematurely.

The Bill would require the High Court to give its agreement to every request for assisted suicide, with potential for appeal to the Court of Appeal. Given the small size of the Family Division of the High Court (18 Judges), and existing demands on their time, any substantial demand for assisted suicide might well result either in the judicial stage of the process becoming a mere rubberstamp, or in delays which, given the limited life expectancy of people making requests, could add to the stress of an already difficult process.

The ‘slippery slope’ to extending assisted suicide further after legalisation 

In other jurisdictions such as Canada, where assisted suicide has been introduced, its scope has rapidly extended. There are already calls for similar extensions here. 

As currently drafted, the Bill allows those facing a terminal illness, with less than six months to live, to seek their death even if they are not in any pain or suffering. It could be argued that a person with a chronic but not life-ending condition, who is suffering badly is being discriminated against by not allowing them to have the same right to assistance with their death.