The push to legalize assisted suicide in the United Kingdom is “losing momentum” after legislation to legalize it stalled, according to a euthanasia prevention advocate.
The House of Lords, the upper chamber of the U.K. Parliament, halted consideration of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill on April 24. More than 1,300 amendments were tabled during the committee stage, a record for any parliamentary bill. The debate lasted over 75 hours, consuming the available parliamentary timetable and preventing the bill from advancing.
There is a “big pushback happening” against assisted suicide, Alex Schadenberg, executive director for the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, said in an April 28 interview with “EWTN News Nightly.”
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The House of Lords “actually did what theyʼre supposed to do,” Schadenberg said. “They debated the bill and the government actually expected them to just have a short debate, have it go to committee, and then have it pass through. And in fact, they did have a thorough debate of the bill.”
The bill was introduced by Kim Leadbeater, a British Labour Party politician, and it passed in the House of Commons in June 2025. It would have allowed terminally ill adults with six months or less to live to request medical help to end their own lives.
While proponents said they expect to resurrect the proposal, it is “definitely at this moment losing momentum,” Schadenberg said. “I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it was recently defeated also in Scotland.”
The Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill “was originally passed by 70 to 56, then it went into committee, then they had the final vote on it and it was defeated,” he said. “The vote flipped around; it was 69 to 57. It was defeated. This is the same group of people who first passed it and then defeated it.”
“We also have the effect of Slovenia, who had a referendum and they overturned their assisted suicide law,” Schadenberg said.
Also in Canada, “thereʼs been a lot of pushback now on euthanasia … So weʼre seeing this big pushback happening, which had not been happening before, partially because our government is very pro-euthanasia,” he said.
‘Language’ of euthanasia matters
In the U.K., and other nations, the language of euthanasia is not always clear, but it is “when a doctor, or in my country of Canada, a nurse practitioner, intentionally kills you,” Schadenberg said.
“This is not about giving you lethal poison and you take it yourself, which is what happens in the U.S. with assisted suicide. This is them actually killing you,” he said.
When “debate actually happens and people get a chance to actually discuss it openly, you realize pretty quickly that the support for it just starts disappearing because the euthanasia movement bases their big push on emotions,” Schadenberg said.
“They want us to fear. They tell us stories of people who were going through difficult health conditions, and the answer for them was killing them,” he said. “So I see that when you get this proper debate, things start turning around.”
In Canada there is “a committee looking at euthanasia for mental illness alone,” he said. “This whole committee is starting to reverse in direction because weʼre actually discussing, ‘What does this actually mean?’”
The committee is “willing to discuss this openly, and the euthanasia lobby is getting very nervous because people are starting to back off from their support,” he said.
While in the U.S., “there are now 13 states … that have legalized assisted suicide,” we “have to be willing to talk about what it is, always compassionately though,” Schadenberg said.
“Iʼm not opposed to euthanasia or assisted suicide just because of how bad this is. Iʼm opposed to killing people,” he said.
If “you allow the language of the other side to rule the debate, you end up losing the debate because people start thinking of it in a fuzzy way rather than for what it actually is,” Schadenberg said.
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