\n<\/p>\n
A former public health minister facing terminal cancer has urged MPs not to bring back the assisted dying bill in England and Wales.<\/p>\n
The Labour MP Ashley Dalton revealed she would be on lifelong treatment for metastatic breast cancer, which has spread throughout her body \u2013 but said her parliamentary colleagues should not revive the bill, which would legalise an assisted death to those with a terminal illness.<\/p>\n
The ballot for a new round of private members\u2019 bills will be drawn on Thursday morning. Backers of assisted dying hope to bring back the bill, which ran out of time to pass after it was talked out by the Lords in the last parliamentary session, despite passing the Commons.<\/p>\n
Supporters hope they can use the Parliament Act to bypass further blocks by the House of Lords, where the bill ran out of time for debate because opponents laid more than 1,000 amendments. Peers who opposed the bill said it was fundamentally flawed.<\/p>\n
Dalton, 53, had not previously made an intervention on the bill because she was serving as a government minister. She resigned from the role in March to focus on her cancer treatment, and so she could continue serving as a constituency MP for West Lancashire.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got incurable but treatable breast cancer,\u201d she said. \u201cTwo years ago, I had some symptoms and they found a large tumour on my ovaries. And when they took it out and tested it, it was breast cancer which had spread.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll be on treatment for ever. My breast cancer is what they call triple negative, which means it doesn\u2019t respond to hormone treatment. I spent about 10 months on an oral chemotherapy and that recently stopped working. So I\u2019ve just started on an intravenous chemotherapy, so I\u2019ll be on that for as long as that works.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dalton said she had found it hard to hear MPs speaking in the chamber about the bill and not be able to speak about her own feelings on having a terminal diagnosis. The bill, tabled by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, would legalise assisted dying for those with a terminal illness with less than six months to live.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Ashley Dalton said the bill \u2018has been so difficult, so divisive and so complicated\u2019.<\/span> Photograph: Sean Smith\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cI found that really frustrating, actually, because I hadn\u2019t gone public with my diagnosis at that stage, but I was dealing with it. I\u2019d had surgery. I knew that I had an incurable cancer,\u201d she said. \u201cI did find it difficult when people said: \u2018I\u2019ve got first-hand experience of this\u2019 and then told a very secondhand experience.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Dalton said she had always been personally opposed to assisted dying but it had been more important to her to legislate properly, despite her own view. She said she was not \u201cdogmatically against\u201d assisted dying, but that by the time the bill had got to its third reading, she believed it was \u201ca pretty dangerous set of affairs\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of amendments were rejected that I think could have made it a lot stronger,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m not saying I would definitely have supported it, but it certainly would have got me further down the road towards doing so.\u201d<\/p>\n She said she was relieved the bill had fallen in the Lords, because of the number of question marks that remained about how it could be applied.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019d be really foolish to be honest, to bring back something as a private member\u2019s bill that has been so difficult, so divisive and so complicated,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is our responsibility of members of the Houses of Parliament to make good law. And that means detail, it means specifics. It means making sure that what we do doesn\u2019t have unintended consequences that affect some of the most vulnerable people.\u201d<\/p>\n Dalton, who sat beside her former boss Wes Streeting as he gave his resignation speech in the Commons on Wednesday, said she feared the bill could put more pressure on an already deeply divided Labour party.<\/p>\n \u201c<\/strong>The Labour party [is] split down the middle \u2013 we\u2019re not going to be able to unite on assisted dying. We\u2019re looking at potentially a leadership challenge, we\u2019re looking at having to really put in the hard yards to win back the trust of people in this country. Do we really want to spend political capital on opening up more division?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A former public health minister facing terminal cancer has urged MPs not to bring back the assisted dying bill in England and Wales. The Labour MP Ashley Dalton revealed she would be on lifelong treatment for metastatic breast cancer, which has spread throughout her body \u2013 but said her parliamentary colleagues should not revive the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49606,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[140,142,4448,654,141,1354,414,6769,3213],"class_list":{"0":"post-49605","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-assisted","9":"tag-bill","10":"tag-bring","11":"tag-cancer","12":"tag-dying","13":"tag-minister","14":"tag-mps","15":"tag-terminal","16":"tag-urges"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/49606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}