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Hilary Benn of Labour says the bill addresses a "very difficult" moral and practical question.

The MP tells the Commons that the "biggest contradiction" for those arguing against it lies with the matter of terminally ill individuals already travelling abroad to end their lives in places where assisted dying is legal.

He describes it as "a gaping hole" in the argument, adding that it has left the Crown Prosecution Service with the "terrible dilemma" of considering whether to prosecute loved ones escorting terminally ill individuals to destinations such as Switzerland.

He says figures show the vast majority have not been prosecuted for this.

Therefore, Benn says: "If we have in effect legalised assisted dying for British citizens who have the money and the means to do it abroad... then why are we not prepared to provide the same means to people to bring their lives to an end who are terminally ill here in the United Kingdom?"

Erica Witherington
Disability affairs reporter

Image source, Reuters

Crossbench peer Baroness Campbell tells me disabled people are tired of explaining why they fear assisted dying.

The veteran disability rights campaigner and founder of Not Dead Yet UK has spent decades opposing attempts to change the law.

She says she understands the desire for control at the end of life.

Her first husband, Graham, contracted HIV through contaminated NHS blood products, and she describes his death as “about as hard as it gets”.

But Baroness Campbell says her own fight to get the support she needs has also shaped her views.

“Choice is only genuine when a real alternative exists,” she says.

She argues many disabled people still can’t get the adequate social care, accessible housing or palliative care they need to live a “good life.”

Families can be exhausted, while people may spend years fighting for basic support.

“Nobody needs to tell a disabled person they should die for them to feel like a burden,” she says.

“Autonomy without support is not freedom. It can be abandonment dressed up as choice.”

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Sadik Al-Hassan, Labour MP for Somerset North, says that when considering whether to support the bill, he had to consider his views as a Muslim.

"I've concluded that while I personally may not choose to make use of this provision, my faith guides my own life. It is not my place to let it dictate someone else's final chapter," he tells MPs.

Al-Hassan says the debate is about whether people "have the right to choose" and that choice is central to faith.

"If I were to use religion as a basis for stripping others, it would turn faith against one of its own foundations," he says, adding that the right to choose "should not be denied any one of our beliefs".

He adds that as a former pharmacist, he's seen the faces "behind this debate", and watched people collect prescriptions "that offer nothing more than a sticking plaster over the terminal illness".

"Pain managed but suffering not ended."

A safe, legal route at the end of life wouldn't replace palliative care but "sit alongside it, offering the small mercy of choice," he adds.

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Lib Dem MP Monica Harding says there has been "no assurance" that government time will be allocated to amendments for today's bill.

She says the question isn't over the principle of assisted dying but if they are content with this bill as they no longer have the prospect of the second chamber making the bill "any safer", alluding to the House of Lords stalling in their consideration of the bill earlier this year.

She says the warning that resonated the most with her was from the Royal College of Psychiatrics when they stated "somebody could proceed to an assisted death where they may have made a different decision had those needs been met".

Harding says during the passage of this bill, two of her siblings who both suffered poor mental health throughout their lives have died. While they suffered with cancer, she witnessed their mental health worsen when staff couldn't get the medication right.

This was due to poor handover practices and difficulties in assessing the mental health of palliative patients, she says, adding neither of these factors will be resolved by today's bill.

"It is our duty to design the systems and processes which are safe for people like my brother and sister," she says, adding they haven't done so here.

The MP adds: "There will be no amendments to protect my brother and sister. I would have wanted them protected."

"The bill is not safe."

Image source, PA Media

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said he will not vote on the bill on Friday, noting he has his "own personal views on the issue" but it was "a matter for Parliament to decide".

He has also stressed the government would officially remain neutral on the bill.

In July, Burnham said the funding of palliative and social care should be "fixed" before assisted dying is considered in England and Wales.

It was the first time he set out his position on the issue after becoming PM.

In 2024, when he was the mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham told BBC Manchester he would "probably vote in favour" of the bill if he was in Parliament.

But in June he suggested it would be challenging to implement before social and palliative care were improved.

Burnham has also told ministers they can vote as they wish but he told them they "should avoid being part of the public debate and should not express views about the implications of the bill for their department's responsibilities".

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Tory MP Alicia Kearns says it is a "fallacy" to suggest that the assisted dying bill should wait until the state of palliative care is fixed.

In fact, she says it provides an opportunity to fix palliative care.

Kearns says palliative care can't always deal with the pain people are in, adding: "We are asking for people to die in pain for something that cannot be given."

She acknowledges that some peers in the House of Lords used tactics to delay the bill, but says others provided legitimate amendments, including on eating disorders.

Kearns say she is not asking MPs to accept the bill as it is and says she will be providing her own amendments.

She concludes: "I will be voting for this bill because living in a perpetual state of torture cannot be right and we cannot allow people to wait for longer."

Susan, 77, from Sidcup gets in touch to say that "palliative care is ideal but not realistic anytime soon".

"I have three to six months to live and had a few spells in hospital this year. I have witnessed challenging patients and frustrated nurses.

"So this ideal palliative requires funds that are simply not available, staff that are perfect and they don't exist. I would like to have choice between suffering and ending my life."

Meanwhile, Tina in Brighton says: "Assisted suicide needs to be legalised as there is a lack of care in available especially in many nursing homes."

Morgan, from Kidderminster, says it "really is not for a government to legislate a bill that allows suicide, the role of government and MPs is always to preserve the life of their constituents".

"Improving palliative and end of life care fundamentally would be a better use of resources," he adds.

"I am very concerned about the assisted dying bill and the effects on the vulnerable," says John in Salford.

MPs continue to debate the bill, which you can watch live at the top of the page.

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Dr Andrew Murrison of the Conservatives says palliative care needs to be improved before they deal with the topic of assisted dying.

The MP adds that he won't be supporting the bill as he does not want to live in the kind of society where the elderly and vulnerable are coerced into "doing the right thing".

"Can we genuinely say that there will be a level playing field" for the vulnerable, he asks.

He says this needs to be a government bill in order to adequately tackle the issue, not a private members bill.

He says if the bill passes, it will put "substantial" pressure on those in the palliative care sector to facilitate assisted dying.

They can rationalise pros and cons, but he says most will go with what they feel in their guts - for him, he says it is "wrong".

"However well intentioned, it will lead in one direction, it will over time leave a grizzly trail of unintended and unforeseen consequences," he ends.

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Labour MP Jess Phillips now shares the story of her own mother, who died when age 61 from Leiomyosarcoma, a cancer that develops in smooth muscle cells.

The former safeguarding minister tells the Commons that her family had gathered at the time when her mother felt she was going to die.

But it wasn't until four weeks later when she actually passed away after Phillips' brother had already returned to France.

"She should have been able to choose to have her family with her," the MP says.

Phillips says her mother "had planned" what would happen after she died, but was not "gifted with the ability" to think about the assisted dying bill, and she "would have taken the choice" on the day she died.

Speaking to the point of coercion, she says: "Don't rest on the laurels that if we do nothing, people today won't be coerced to death. That will happen today."

"Doing nothing is not the same as acting."

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Pippa Heylings from the Liberal Democrats says "we need to get better at talking more openly about death and what dying well means".

She says the ongoing debate is about allowing due process to continue and confirms she continues to support the assisted dying bill.

Heylings references her constituent Jodie, who has a brain tumour.

The prospect of the disease taking over Jodie's brain "frightens her more than she can express", Heyling says, but knowing that the option is available would provide her with "enormous comfort and reassurance".

She goes on to say that "what we don't talk enough about is the status quo" that is often "unsafe and cruel" for terminally ill people, some of whom are "taking matters into their own hands".

"This bill will not make choice for anyone, it will simply allow terminally ill people to make choice for themselves safely, challenging the status quo and with loved ones around them if they so wish," Heylings concludes.

Rozina Sini
BBC Your Voice

Image source, Janice Cuer

As MPs continue to debate the assisted dying bill, readers have been sending in their thoughts.

Frank Short's wife Jenny died yesterday at a care home, after being diagnosed with cancer in summer.

Short, from Shepton Mallet, Somerset, says by the end of Jenny's life, his "extremely active" wife was "a shadow of her former self and looked like a living skeleton".

"This was not a dignified death," he says, and he believes if she had the choice, she would have "terminated her life when she was still her".

He explains they both caught a virus in February, but she never recovered.

She was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the end of July and went to a care home near Wales and was there for six weeks as she "gradually deteriorated".

"At the end she could not communicate, she could not move, she could not swallow, she had not eaten for weeks and had been unable to take fluids for several days."

"The assisted dying bill should pass," he says, praising the care home staff but saying his wife had "no control".

"This made my wife suffer."

Kate Whannel
Reporting from the House of Commons

Ashley Dalton is given a long hug by fellow Labour MP Jess Asato after finishing her speech.

She also receives supportive pats on the shoulder from others around her.

Many ministers - including Defence Secretary Wes Streeting - appear to have been in the House of Commons specifically to hear her speak, as they leave once she concludes.

Image source, House of Commons

Labour MP Ashley Dalton, speaking against the bill, says she was "overwhelmed" with grief, fear and anxiety while processing her stage four incurable breast cancer diagnosis.

She says prognoses are "notoriously difficult" to predict by medical professionals and says there is no provision for depression in the bill, adding individuals could be suicidal and have unmet mental health needs prior to developing a terminal illness.

The former health minister says today's debate is on the bill as it currently stands, not for sending it back to the House of Lords, and says the bill "does not protect the most vulnerable".

She says "until we can say that everyone that needs it has access to high quality, palliative care, then nobody has a choice".

She says their first responsibility is to "write a law that is safe, and workable", which she says this one is not.

She adds: "My days may be numbered, but that doesn't mean that I want this chamber to rush through bad law just so I might have a chance to see it or use it."

Kate Whannel
Reporting from the House of Commons

Rebecca Wilcox, Dame Esther Rantzen’s daughter, is sitting in the gallery watching on as MPs debate the bill her mother has long been calling for.

She is taking notes and occasionally shaking her head at some of the MPs’ comments.

Veteran broadcaster Rantzen, 86, is terminally ill with cancer and has been in favour of legalising assisted dying.

Image source, House of Commons

Conservative MP Kit Malthouse, who co-sponsored the bill, echoes criticism by Lauren Edwards about the House of Lords filibustering the assisted dying bill.

He says that "what's at stake today is our democracy" and that "if this bill falls today, one of the biggest losers will be the standing of this house".

Malthouse goes on to say a vote against the bill is a vote for the status quo of "misery and degradation and cruelty for so many".

He references countries around the world that have successfully operated assisted dying and says it should "not be beyond us" to design a system that would work.

Labour MP Dr Zubir Ahmed speaks of his experience as a medical professional, and says many of his patients have flickered between a "terminal experience" and a "life limiting illness".

He says he is convinced "now more than ever" that the current social and palliative care system is not ready to meet the demands of the bill.

The bill will "not serve" its aims of bringing choice and control for a quick death, he adds.

In the bill, one of the requirements is patients have been diagnosed with six months to live or less. Ahmed says this is "not a good enough marker for proscribing death", and he often can get this wrong himself as conditions change.

"The foundational elements of this bill will create the allure of choice and control but not the agency to pursue either," Ahmed says.

The Labour MP adds that doctors are not adequately trained to detect coercive behaviour in the context of the bill, and says the NHS is "not ready" in its current state for it.

Image source, House of Commons

Father of the House and Conservative MP Edward Leigh is speaking next - he says today's debate is about is "ensuring that the bill that we are debating today leaves the house unamended".

This means it will go to the House of Lords, which will be unable to halt its progress.

Leigh goes on to say that he is in favour of being assisted to die - but he says that currently happens all the time with the help of doctors and nurses in hospices.

He agrees with Prime Minister Andy Burnham's call for improvements to palliative care but does not agree with this bill as he believes "in time it will become an assisted suicide bill".

Leigh is in favour of being assisted to dying in the least amount of pain possible through palliative care.

"I urge you before you vote for this bill at 14:30 BST remember what sort of society you will be creating, not a society that loves life," he concludes.

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In the Commons, Labour MP Claire Hazelgrove recounts the story of her mother Ruth who passed away last year from a rare blood cancer, having just turned 61.

Her mother had "access to good palliative care" but Hazelbrove will "never forget seeing her writhing and screaming in pain".

The MP says the current law means her mother could not tell her family what her plan was for the end of her life, and say a goodbye to her family.

She says her mother died alone, and family are unaware if she passed away 11 months ago today or tomorrow.

"My hope, and I know my mum's hope, is that her story can help us choose to end this harmful status quo and see terminally ill adults finally have true choice over their lives and their deaths," Hazelgrove says.

As MPs debate, we've been hearing from readers, who have shared their views on the assisted dying bill.

"Just get and do it! People who are against it don't need to use it and can expressly opt out with a simple declaration that nobody can override - not family or legals. But please don't force the 'suffer to the bitter end'", says Andrew in Gloucester.

Gary says: "It's so sad to see a few politicians vote against a bill that the majority of the public support, and is there to give people in incredible pain to choose when to go."

While TJD in Oxford says "there should be a referendum before a group of unrepresentative MPs make this decision".

"I am totally against this bill. As a Christian and disabled I believe it should be dropped. I wish they would make more efforts to fund palliative treatment," says Ikhlas.

Edwards' speech comes to an end - she is followed by Conservative MP Karen Bradley as MPs move on to the debate portion of the session.

Bradley says voices deserve to be heard and it's important to respect all views.

"So often it's the quiet voices that need to be heard," she says, referencing her previous time as the parliamentary under-secretary for preventing abuse.

She says further amendments to the bill need to be made.

Bradley says she worries that the bill could lead to people being coercively controlled into ending their life, before giving way to a number of MPs, including the bill's former sponsor Kim Leadbeater.

Leadbeater says the bill was amended to ensure professionals involved in assisted dying would receive training and that multiple checks for coercion would be carried out throughout the process of assisted dying.

Bradley later comes back in to say her "fear is for the person that doesn't want to make a fuss" and "the person that feels guilty about the care" they have received.