Welby says assisted dying bill 'dangerous'

The Archbishop of Canterbury has called the idea of assisted dying "dangerous" and suggested it would lead to a “slippery slope” where more people would feel compelled to have their life ended medically. The head of the Church of England was speaking with the BBC ahead of the first reading in parliament of a bill that would give terminally ill people in England and Wales the right to end their lives. Archbishop Welby talked of being unconcerned that opinion polls suggest that, on this issue, the Church of England more broadly is considerably out of step with the public as a whole.

Secular groups in the UK have long called for religion to be removed from the assisted dying debate and even for senior bishops to lose their right to sit in the House of Lords where they can vote on the matter. “For 30 years as a priest I've sat with people at their bedside. And people have said, ‘I want my mum, I want my daughter, I want my brother to go because this is so horrible,'” said the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Justin Welby said that he did not want people to feel guilty for having such thoughts, saying that as a teenager he had sometimes harboured similar thoughts about his own father in the final years of his life. “What I'm saying is that introducing this legislation opens the way to it broadening out such that people who are not in that situation [terminally ill] asking for this, or feeling pressured to ask for it,” he said. The archbishop also referred to the death last .