Former public health minister Ashley Dalton, who is living with terminal breast cancer, has urged MPs not to bring back the assisted dying bill in England and Wales. The Labour MP revealed she is on lifelong treatment for metastatic breast cancer that has spread throughout her body, but said her parliamentary colleagues should not revive the legislation that would legalise an assisted death for those with a terminal illness.
Bill's Uncertain Future
The ballot for a new round of private members' bills will be drawn on Thursday morning. Backers of assisted dying hope to reintroduce the bill, which ran out of time to pass after being talked out by the House of Lords in the last parliamentary session, despite passing the Commons. Supporters aim to use the Parliament Act to bypass further blocks by the Lords, where the bill stalled because opponents laid more than 1,000 amendments. Peers who opposed the bill said it was fundamentally flawed.
Dalton's Personal Struggle
Dalton, 53, had not previously spoken on the bill because she was serving as a government minister. She resigned in March to focus on her cancer treatment and continue serving as constituency MP for West Lancashire. 'I've got incurable but treatable breast cancer,' she said. 'Two years ago, I had some symptoms and they found a large tumour on my ovaries. And when they took it out and tested it, it was breast cancer which had spread.' She explained that her cancer is triple negative, meaning it does not respond to hormone treatment, and she recently started intravenous chemotherapy after oral chemotherapy stopped working.
Frustration with Debate
Dalton said she found it hard to hear MPs speaking about the bill without being able to share her own feelings about having a terminal diagnosis. 'I found that really frustrating, actually, because I hadn't gone public with my diagnosis at that stage, but I was dealing with it. I'd had surgery. I knew that I had an incurable cancer,' she said. 'I did find it difficult when people said: 'I've got first-hand experience of this' and then told a very secondhand experience.'
Concerns Over the Bill
Dalton said she has always been personally opposed to assisted dying but believed it was more important to legislate properly. She noted she is not 'dogmatically against' assisted dying, but by the bill's third reading, she considered it 'a pretty dangerous set of affairs.' 'A lot of amendments were rejected that I think could have made it a lot stronger,' she said. 'I'm not saying I would definitely have supported it, but it certainly would have got me further down the road towards doing so.' She expressed relief the bill fell in the Lords due to remaining question marks about its application.
Call for Caution
'I think it'd be really foolish to be honest, to bring back something as a private member's bill that has been so difficult, so divisive and so complicated,' she said. 'It is our responsibility of members of the Houses of Parliament to make good law. And that means detail, it means specifics. It means making sure that what we do doesn't have unintended consequences that affect some of the most vulnerable people.'
Impact on Labour Party
Dalton, who sat beside former boss Wes Streeting during his resignation speech, said she feared the bill could further divide an already split Labour party. 'The Labour party [is] split down the middle – we're not going to be able to unite on assisted dying. We're looking at potentially a leadership challenge, we're looking at having to really put in the hard yards to win back the trust of people in this country. Do we really want to spend political capital on opening up more division?'
