The Commons reject assisted suicide by 286 votes to 270

On 11 September 2026 the House of Commons rejected, by 286 votes to 270, the bill that would have legalised assisted suicide in England and Wales for patients whose prognosis did not exceed six months. The vote closes a two-year parliamentary debate: passed by the Commons in 2024, and again in June 2025, the text had been blocked in the House of Lords, which had tabled nearly 1,200 amendments before the session ended in April, before being reintroduced in June. The final debate lasted four hours.

The Church has never held human life to be a good of which man may dispose at will. The fifth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” forbids each man to attempt his own life as much as another’s, for no one is master of what he did not receive from himself. St Thomas teaches that to take one’s own life is a threefold wrong: against the love every being owes himself, against the community from which he cuts himself off, and against God, sole master of life and death. To name the help to kill oneself a “right” or a “mercy” changes nothing in the nature of the act: it remains a homicide, and the hand lent to it, a cooperation in homicide.

Measured by this rule, the bill was evil in its principle, and not merely in its safeguards. Before the vote, the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales had called the faithful to write to their members of Parliament, warning that such a text, once passed, would expose the vulnerable to the pressure to have done with life. After the rejection, the bishop charged with life issues thanked those who had fought the bill, recalling that the true measure of a compassionate society is its will to accompany its own through trial rather than to push them to do away with themselves. The established Church itself opposed it, its new primate holding that the effort to prevent suicide must hold good for the incurably ill as well.

The government had left members free to vote in conscience, outside any party line. The head of government, the first Catholic in that office since the realm’s break with Rome in the sixteenth century, held himself apart from the division, saying he did not wish to weigh unduly on the debate and calling for a strengthening of palliative care. On that point tradition does not contradict him: to relieve pain, to watch over and accompany the dying to the end is a work of mercy; to hasten death never is. The compassion that kills is not charity, which bears the neighbour’s burden without taking from him the time God leaves him.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the Fifth Commandment; St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa-IIae, q. 64, a. 5; St Augustine, The City of God, Book I.