Consent Withdrawn

How Assisted Dying and DNR Policies Threaten the Right to Live

This week, MPs passed the Leadbeater Bill at third reading in Parliament, pushing the Private Members Bill one significant step closer to a law legalising assisted dying for terminally ill adults in England and Wales. On paper, it promises dignity and choice. In reality, it signals the start of something far darker, a shift in the balance between care and control, between life as a right and death as a bureaucratic solution.

Assisted dying is framed as compassion. But what happens when institutions that refuse to participate are punished? In Canada, hospices that declined to offer assisted suicide lost funding, leases, and licenses. The Delta Hospice Society was shut down entirely because it refused to host death within its walls. Now, Britain is on the same path. Under this new law, hospices in England and Wales will be required to cooperate either directly or indirectly with assisted dying protocols. Compliance will become the price of survival.

This shift doesn’t arrive in isolation. Over the past few years, Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders have expanded under the radar. What was once a personal and medical decision made in close consultation with patients and families has morphed into a bureaucratic instrument, often applied without consent. During the COVID-19 pandemic, DNRs were issued en masse in care homes. Elderly residents, people with disabilities, and vulnerable patients were assigned DNRs without ever being asked. For some, their first knowledge of it came after it was too late to challenge.

Together, these developments point to a disturbing trend: a healthcare system being repurposed not to prolong life, but to manage death. The narrative of “choice” has become a smokescreen for something more insidious. We’re moving from the right to die to the expectation to die. If you are old, disabled, chronically ill, or simply too expensive to care for, your continued existence becomes a question mark, a matter to be reviewed, assessed, and possibly denied.

These figures reveal a concerning narrative: during the pandemic, DNACPR orders were often recorded without full involvement from the patient or their family. Meanwhile, despite a growing demand, hospice services are struggling financially, with many beds unused or unavailable, contrasting sharply with the growing sorrow of daily pain-related deaths.

This is no longer about consent. It’s about coercion through omission. If DNRs can be applied without your knowledge, and hospices can be stripped of funding for refusing to kill, then we are no longer talking about healthcare. We are talking about a state system that decides whose life is worth fighting for and whose is not. Patients are being pushed into death not with open cruelty, but with procedural indifference.

The political class, cloaked in the language of empathy, is building a system where the final gift it offers the vulnerable is a quick exit. Terminally ill patients are told that this is about dignity, but where is the dignity when palliative care is underfunded and hospices are forced to close? Where is the dignity in being made to feel like a burden? And where is the freedom in a system that punishes those who resist its logic?

This is how a civilisation falters, not with open barbarism, but with cold efficiencies. A society that offers assisted dying before universal access to care is not merciful. It is merely pragmatic. It outsources compassion to cost-saving spreadsheets. It erodes moral clarity and replaces it with procedural compliance. And it leaves the individual with a single horrifying question: How long until I have to justify staying alive?

This is not a dystopian warning. It is a present reality. The state is not offering you the right to die. It is increasingly demanding that you earn the right to live. And if you don’t, you will be offered the quiet dignity of absence.

We must resist this. We must fight for a healthcare system that prioritises the vulnerable, funds care over killing, and protects institutions that choose to preserve life. We must say no to the quiet coercion of DNRs issued behind closed doors. No to legislation that rewards compliance with death. And no to a society that offers assisted dying while neglecting those still fighting to live.

This is not compassion. It is surrender. And the line must be drawn now, before consent is not just withdrawn, but forgotten altogether.