All of us are familiar with the term ‘scaremongering’. The word is frequently employed by campaigns advocating liberalisation of the law as a means to dismiss opponents’ concerns. In doing so, they resort not to argument but smear tactics, seeking to caricature criticism as exaggerated fantasy. Of course, when their opponents’ warnings are later proven right or even understated, an apology is rarely forthcoming. I well recall the howls of derision that met warnings concerning the rise in immigration that would follow Eastern European countries joining the EU and the accompanying pressure it would place on public services. Those warnings ended up being conservative compared with the vast numbers that actually arrived in the UK.

But at the same time as dismissing their critics as scaremongers, proponents of the relaxation of long-standing laws are often guilty of their own form of distortion. Not so much overestimating consequences through scaremongering but underestimating them via what might be called ‘rare-mongering’ – the claim that the reforms they seek are only for exceptional, complex, rare situations that will have little impact on social norms. Consider, for example, the legalisation of abortion in 1967, supposedly for rare cases such as when the health of the mother was at risk, or the relaxation of the divorce laws in the same era. One does not have to be an opponent of these social changes to acknowledge that more than 250,000 abortions in England and Wales each year and the astronomical rise in the divorce rate in recent decades suggest the claims of those advocating for these changes in the 1960s proved to be severe cases of ‘rare-mongering’.

Legal experts have already warned that our membership of the ECHR could lead to a similar expansion in assisted suicide laws here

It is partly for these reasons that I am so worried about Kim Leadbeater’s Bill in Parliament to legalise assisted suicide and doubtful of assurances that its introduction would merely be for rare cases that can be contained. Attempts to dismiss concerns about the likely consequences of legalisation as scaremongering are increasingly unsustainable given the prescience of warnings in other jurisdictions where the expansion of those eligible to die has been rapid and wide. The primary example of this is Canada, a country that only introduced its ‘Medical Assistance In Dying’ (MAID) programme in 2016. Initially, the practice was limited only to the terminally ill, or those whose death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’ – similar to the kind of law proposed here.

However, the tight restrictions that accompanied the introduction of MAID in Canada survived fewer than five years. Safeguards were soon eroded by judicial attacks from human rights challenges – once you allow assisted deaths for some, depriving others of the ‘right’ is easily deemed discriminatory – and the tendency of assisted dying laws not only to anaesthetise those who die at the hands of the state but also whole populations who become so used to the practice that, like the proverbial boiled frog, they gradually accept what once would have been unthinkable. In 2021, this rise in temperature led to the expansion of MAID to include those suffering from “a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability” and, in 2027, boiling point will be reached when people with mental illness are set to be included, with minors in line to follow soon after, as recommended by a recent report from the Canadian Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on MAID. Reports have already emerged of a woman with anorexia intending to seek an assisted death in Canada once the law expands to include mental illness.

The slippery slope has thus generated an avalanche in Canada, a country where the homeless and people with disabilities have sought euthanasia because of a lack of access to adequate care, veterans and a retired Paralympian have been proactively offered an assisted death without requesting it (worryingly, Kim Leadbeater’s Bill would explicitly allow doctors to initiate such conversations unprompted here), and a Parliamentary report has hailed the savings MAID creates for its health service.

Legal experts have already warned that our membership of the ECHR could lead to a similar expansion in assisted suicide laws here. I have great sympathy for those who experience significant suffering at the end of their lives. But the job of MPs is to consider the effects of legislation on everyone, including any unintended consequences. I am concerned that a ‘right to die’ would soon evolve into a ‘duty to die’ and put vulnerable people at risk – indeed, over 35% of Canadians who died under Canada’s MAID laws in 2022 reported being motivated by being a “perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers”.

Far from dismissing the warnings of opponents of assisted suicide as scaremongering, a far greater concern ought to lie in the rare-mongering of those who, while asserting a modest law for exceptional cases, would risk opening the door to something more sinister.