An MP in the early stages of their political career secures a coveted top-five spot in the private members’ ballot. They want to bring about huge societal change with their legislative proposal. The issue they choose has come before parliament multiple times in the past, but has failed. Yet a pre-existing bill in the House of Lords could help secure support among MPs and with drafting the proposals. I’m not describing Kim Leadbeater’s 2024 Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which seeks to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales – though you’d be forgiven for thinking so. Rather, this is 1966 and the Liberal MP David Steel’s Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill, which sought to legalise abortion.
Prior to the 1966 ballot, there had been six attempts to change the law on abortion, starting with the Labour MP Joseph Reeves’s private members’ bill in 1952. The Labour peer Lewis Silkin brought forward legislation in 1965, withdrawing it once Steel had successfully introduced his motion so that campaigning efforts could be focused on the Commons. Charlie Falconer, who proposed the assisted dying bill to the Lords in July, did the same following Leadbeater’s. Steel was lobbied hard by the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), a group that hoped to lift all restrictions on abortion (not just in cases where the woman’s health was at risk), just as Leadbeater appears to have been by the campaigning organisation Dignity in Dying.
But while there are striking similarities between the (successful) attempt to legalise abortion in the 1960s and assisted dying, the two endeavours may not have the same outcome. In the 1960s, the main medical and religious bodies had already published reports on their concerns and positions on abortion in response to Silkin’s bill, giving Steel an idea of where opposition might lie. The British Medical Journal featured the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ (RCOG) report on legalised abortion in April 1966, two months before Steel’s bill was introduced to parliament. While this made clear the College was sceptical, it also laid out what it expected to see in any proposed law. The RCOG also made it clear that, given its members would be responsible for implementing any new law, they expected to be consulted. The RCOG’s then president, John Peel, ended up chairing a committee that advised government at all stages of the bill. And, following a major intervention from the Royal College and the British Medical Association in November 1966, Steel made a significant amendment to it. He told the Institute of Contemporary British History in 2001 that had he not pre-empted their objection and reworded the bill, “a large middle ground” of MPs would have been “very tempted under pressure from the medical bodies” to vote for an amendment that would have made the legislation far narrower in scope.
This time, palliative care doctors, whom you might expect to be called upon to be either the “coordinating doctor” or “independent doctor” named in the assisted dying bill (the medical professionals responsible for assessing a terminally ill person’s request to die) have been some of the most vocal opponents of the legislation. Similarly, if there have been discussions with either the chief medical officers of England and Wales, or senior judges in the High Court – both of whom would be granted enormous responsibilities if the bill became law – they have not been made public. Leadbeater “should do as much consultation as possible to get people on board”, Steel told me last week.
Unlike Steel, Leadbeater does not have the fortune of having the right people in the right place at the right time. “Mine was the sixth [sic] attempt by private members’ legislation to try to change the law on abortion. But it’s the only one that had time. The others all failed through lack of time, not lack of support,” Steel said. His bill not only had broad support from the new Labour government, but the key figures needed to steer it through parliament were in favour of legislative change. Kenneth Robinson, the author of one of the previous attempts to legislate, was minister of health. The government’s chief whip, John Silkin, was the son of Lewis Silkin, whose bill in the Lords was a precursor to Steel’s. The chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Douglas Houghton, was married to the chair of ALRA. “That proved to be immensely helpful,” said Steel, a master of understatement.
Leadbeater has no such support. Keir Starmer has previously said he believes there are grounds to change the law on assisted dying, and early in the bill’s life some MPs expressed concern to me that this might convince newly elected members in particular to vote for the legislation. The Prime Minister has since said he will not make public his position ahead of the second reading on 29 November. Yet the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, and Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who would share much of the responsibility for implementing legislative change, have opposed it. Steel, who is in favour of Leadbeater’s bill, sees this as a substantial issue. If the Health Secretary is against, he said, “it makes life very difficult”. But, he added, “it’s not impossible”.
Many questions remain – questions unanswered by the legislation’s publication on 11 November. If Leadbeater’s bill makes it through the second reading, there will be plenty more debate about whether the proposals can receive adequate scrutiny through the private members’ bill process – and whether we are ready for them.
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone