A bill to legalise physician assisted suicide was thrown out by the UK parliament's second chamber, the House of Lords, last week, after a day of impassioned debate. The private member's bill, tabled by the crossbench peer Joel Joffe, was derailed when peers voted 148 to 100 to delay it for six months.

The rarely used amendment to delay the bill was tabled by the Liberal Democrat peer and criminal lawyer Alex Carlile QC, who described the bill as “morally indefensible.”

The Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, which would allow …