BMJ  2006;332:1169 (20 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7551.1169

News

UK House of Lords rejects physician assisted suicide

BMJ

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

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 only physician assisted suicide and not voluntary euthanasia, is closely modelled on the law that has been in place for eight years in the US state of Oregon.

It has tight safeguards, which Sheila McLean, the director of the centre of law and ethics in medicine at Glasgow University, argued last week would give patients better protection than . . . [Full text of this article]

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This article has been cited by other articles:

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