Thank you to the hundreds of constituents who have written to me about the Assisted Dying private members’ Bill, which had its Third Reading stage on Friday 20 June, and will now go to the House of Lords for further scrutiny.

This has been a very contentious issue, and I have been grateful to receive hundreds of emails, letters and postcards about the Bill from constituents on both sides of the argument, often with their own very personal reasons for either supporting or opposing the Bill.

From a moral standpoint, I have always been in favour of being able to give people a choice toward the end of their life, for much the same reasons as many of the supporters of the Bill: I would have liked my close family members to have had a choice, and I would like to be able to decide for myself if it ever came to it.

For me, the question has always been the strength of the legislation, and whether it contains the strong, practical safeguards necessary to protect vulnerable people from coercion.

But the most important argument in favour of assisted dying was learning that over six thousand people a year die in unbearable pain that cannot be alleviated with palliative medicine. We also must not forget that a study by the Office of National Statistics found that adults diagnosed with terminal illnesses are twice as likely to die by suicide. This means that a significant number of people each year are dying in an often needlessly violent, unpredictable, and distressing way. This is a tragedy for both the family of the terminally ill person, but also for the ill person themself who shouldn’t have to suffer even more than they already are. It is unimaginably sad to think someone would be drawn to violently ending their own life because we could not provide them with the means to do so peacefully. Legalising assisted dying would remove the need for such distressing attempts.

The Bill, in my view, contains a number of safeguards that will make the practice safe. I thought this at Second Reading, and the changes made during the Bill Committee, which heard from legal and medical experts, as well as those with lived experience, are positive additions that strengthen the Bill as a whole. In particular, the requirement for all doctors involved and members of expert panels to undergo domestic abuse training, so they are better able to spot signs of coercion; the appointment of independent advocates to any applicants who also have severe autism or other forms of learning disabilities; and the increase in custodial sentence for coercing someone into an assisted death to match that of murder.

Nevertheless, I understand that some will be disappointed in my decision to support this Bill, but I hope that the reasons I have outlined above can go some way to explaining why I believe that the Bill is strong enough to offer those who want it the choice, while protecting those who are at risk.

Thank you again for writing to me about this very important issue.

Best wishes,

Emily