I don’t want to get wound up tonight so I’ll try to keep this brief. It has been a long, difficult afternoon. Before now, I have always tried to position myself on the fence when it comes to assisted suicide: people have a right to choose what to do with their lives, including ending them if they so wish. Yet at the end of the day, there is no getting around the fact that what happened today in Westminster is very dangerous indeed. Legalising suicide under the guise of ‘Assisted dying’ effectively makes it legal for one person to kill another. Like many disabled activists, I worry that, whatever safeguards are put in place, sooner or later this bill will lead to people with disabilities or severe medical conditions starting to feel coerced or obliged into taking their lives. That is why I went up to Westminster this afternoon to join the protest against it.

Consciously or unconsciously, what happened today opened a very dangerous gate. After all, the right to die is the right to kill, and all too soon I fear we’ll see some very vulnerable people being offered euthanasia as an option. However rigid or stringent the new guidelines will be, the danger is they will be gradually watered down so that eventually more and more people will be offered assisted dying as an option. Frankly, I wonder whether it could one say include conditions like Muscular Dystrophy: if so, might this bill have included the guys I grew up with at school? Could they potentially have been given the option to end their lives; and might they have felt obliged to do so for the sake of their parents?

Perhaps not, but nonetheless I fear what happened today potentially opened the gate to somewhere truly dark. It ultimately sends out a message that certain lives aren’t worth living and should be ended in an act of compassion. However noble those who back this bill may try to frame it, today we crossed an extremely dangerous, dark threshold.