This past week has marked historic progress for two of our campaigns: for the legalisation of assisted dying and for an end to criminal sanctions for women over abortions in England and Wales.
But alongside this progress has come a surge of misinformation online. Vocal opponents are raising the alarm over supposed dangers and oversights that the laws already cover. More than ever, it’s vital that we cut through the noise and reaffirm the facts.
Challenging misinformation
The Assisted Dying Bill proposes more safeguards than any jurisdiction anywhere in the world. It features more hurdles for a patient to access an assisted death than anywhere else. It applies exclusively to terminally ill adults with six months or fewer left to live and with mental capacity who make a clear, voluntary, and informed decision to end their lives. Having a disability, mental health condition, or eating disorder does not make someone eligible. Anyone wanting to access an assisted death under the law will need sign-off from two doctors and then an expert panel consisting of a senior lawyer, psychiatrist, and social worker – with this last aspect only already existing in Spain. Claims that doctors will become ‘killers’ who ‘inject’ patients are also inflammatory and false – as our Chief Executive Andrew Copson pointed out on the radio to one Christian campaigner who used those very words.
Attempts to derail the Bill – such as one amendment to remove the implementation deadline (despite every other country having managed to implement it in three years and the Bill already allowing for four), another to restrict access to assisted dying only to those with a prognosis of one month to live (despite the process itself likely taking more than one month), and another to raise the mental capacity threshold so high it would exclude almost everyone – were all rightly rejected. Yet some opponents have since misleadingly claimed these represented essential safeguards being rejected. In reality, these amendments weren’t about strengthening the Bill – they were designed to sabotage it.
Compassion, not prosecution
On abortion, the facts are equally clear. The amendment passed by MPs – to decriminalise abortion for women – does not make abortion ‘unregulated’. The 1967 Abortion Act still applies: abortions still require medical sign-off and are subject to strict term limits. What has changed is that women will no longer face arrest or prosecution. In the 2020s alone, over 100 British women have been subjected to invasive police investigations, in many cases after ‘suspicious miscarriages’. Only one was eventually prosecuted but many of them will have been severely traumatised by the police, for example, asking to see their period tracking app, or their messages to their loved ones – right after they have already been through something traumatic.
This would be unthinkable in almost every other country that has already decriminalised abortion. Almost all of them – countries like France, Spain, Australia, Canada, and even nowadays Northern Ireland — do not treat abortion as a criminal matter. And despite inflammatory rhetoric, abortions in the latter stages of pregnancy remain vanishingly rare and are always the result of profound personal or medical crises. The law is now set to treat those women with compassion, not prosecution.
These are progressive changes that humanists have fought for for decades because we believe in freedom of choice, human rights, and equality. They do not compel anyone to have an assisted death or an abortion. They simply protect the right of individuals to make deeply personal decisions about their own bodies. But we must be clear: the forces against us have never been more determined to drag us backwards — on these issues and more. So many people, who know little about these Bills, are ready to denounce them in full – based on misinformation or ‘religious feeling’. But, thanks to the support of our members, we’re helping to create evidence-led policy, and a more tolerant society, where rational thinking and kindness prevail.
Notes
For further comment or information, media should contact Humanists UK Director of Public Affairs and Policy Richy Thompson at press@humanists.uk or phone 0203 675 0959.
Read more about our work on taking abortion out of criminal law and creating a compassionate assisted dying law.
Humanists UK is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people. Powered by over 140,000 members and supporters, we advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail. We provide ceremonies, pastoral care, education, and support services benefitting over a million people every year and our campaigns advance humanist thinking on ethical issues, human rights, and equal treatment for all.
Humanists defend the right of each individual to live by their own personal values, and the freedom to make decisions about their own life so long as this does not result in harm to others. Humanists do not share the attitudes to death and dying held by some religious believers, in particular that the manner and time of death are for a deity to decide, and that interference in the course of nature is unacceptable. We firmly uphold the right to life but we recognise that this right carries with it the right of each individual to make their own judgement about whether their life should be prolonged in the face of pointless suffering.