UK lawmakers reject bid to legalise assisted dying

British lawmakers rejected on Friday a proposal to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill people, dealing a major setback to campaigners and bringing the latest effort to change the law to an end. The result leaves Britain’s ban on assisted dying unchanged, extending a decades-long debate over whether terminally ill people should be allowed to end their lives with medical assistance and how vulnerable people could be protected from coercion if the law was changed. Parliament’s lower chamber, the House of Commons, rejected the legislation by 286 votes to 270. The bill would have allowed mentally competent, terminally ill adults in England and Wales with six months or fewer to live to end their lives with medical assistance following approval from a panel of professionals.

Bill falls Lauren Edwards, a lawmaker in Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s Labour Party, had brought the legislation back through a mechanism known as a Private Member’s Bill, whereby an individual lawmaker selected in a ballot can try to pass a law independently of the government. “This is a hugely disappointing result not for me but for the many thousands of terminally ill people and their loved ones who were given hope when the Commons voted for this Bill last year,” she said in a statement, referring to the lower house’s previous backing for the legislation. The previous attempt to pass the bill failed after it ran out of time in the House of Lords, the unelected upper chamber. Dignity in Dying, one of the groups campaigning for the bill, also decried Friday’s outcome as “a devastating setback for dying people”, but added: “this issue is not going away. Law change on assisted dying remains a matter of when, not if. ” Since Friday’s measure failed at its first parliamentary hurdle, it cannot be…