Urgent Action Notice

We Must Act by 8th October 2021!

Not Dead Yet UK urgently needs your help and there are easy ways here to join in and speak up.

We’re fighting for our lives again and the opposition will win if we don’t act now.

Why?

The Assisted Dying Bill goes back to the House of Lords on Friday 22nd October 2021 for its second reading when there is a big debate.

The Lords don’t realise how many people are very worried about this Bill.

The Bill is about making assisting suicide legal, including when people are not dying yet – that’s why our opponents are trying to change the law.

The safeguards in the bill do not say assisted suicide must be a last resort and ONLY for people who are terminally ill. 

End of life care is underfunded. This means people who are terminally ill don’t always get the help they need and they sometimes suffer.

But the bill is not about relieving suffering – it’s about ending many people’s lives early. Killing people isn’t the way to fix this problem.

We have a little time left to show how many of us (especially those with degenerative conditions, and long term illness), would rather see the government improve palliative care than make an assisted suicide Bill.

You can read more about NDY UK’s objections to the Bill here:

 https://notdeadyetuk.org/we-need-help-to-live-not-to-die/

What do we want?

We know life can be a struggle – but we know someone’s suffering can be relieved without resorting to killing them.

Disabled people risk being killed because decent health care for us is seen by our opponents as too difficult, or too expensive to organise.

For example, young disabled people with mental health trauma are already being offered assisted suicides by doctors in other countries. In Canada, their government finance department has calculated that they save over £8,000 for every person killed.

We think the focus should be on improving the health and care support available – palliative care doctors and nurses are our allies in this and agree. After all, doctors and nurses have been supporting us to live!

We know many people who rely on life-saving health care are afraid of what will happen if assisting suicide becomes normalised, instead of trying to give us support for all our lifetime.

Those of us who can find a way to speak out need to advocate for many more people who can’t.

Background:

Nobody chooses to feel so desperate that they want to commit suicide.

We all need to be able to choose a decent life and then have support to die comfortably, peacefully, and with the people who matter to us when our time eventually comes.

We know people are often unsupported and many will unnecessarily feel they have no choice but to die by suicide because of unmet care needs. It doesn’t need to be this way. We shouldn’t be ok with it.

Support to live a better life is not offered as a choice in this bill.

Investment in better palliative care is not a choice in this bill.

Our lives are worth living and we deserve a good quality of life – not a beastly choice between suffering or being put down like a pet with expensive health needs.

Discrimination

The recent Covid 19 pandemic has highlighted how disposable our lives are to this government.

There have been numbers of cases reported of disabled and older people having Do Not Attempt Resuscitation notices applied to them, without consent. 

Many of us were formally ruled out of the right to intensive care support, in advance.

More than a million of us weren’t added to shielding lists.

Many learning disabled people living in shared housing died because of the lack of safe support and protection.

Suicides in our community have increased.

This is the worst time in modern history to offer people suicide instead of real help!

It’s About Us – Without Us

The opinions of the wider public show they want assisted suicide. But they may have no or little experience of the real lives of the disabled people this law will apply to. They do not understand or know about the many struggles that we overcome every day. They find it difficult to believe that our lives are meaningful.

We do know this – but views from people directly affected are not being heard – we need to speak up together! Our views should be central – because it’s about us.

No disabled people’s organisations have ever campaigned FOR this. Only against.

We believe that the majority view is that we cannot trust this erosion of our rights – please help us prove that is what many of you think.

More about public opinion and statistics are here:

https://notdeadyetuk.org/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics/