As the UK Parliament debates controversial legislation to allow assisted suicide and abortion up to birth, the country’s Catholic politicians are struggling on to defend pro-life values.
Sir Edward Leigh, a member of the House of Commons, who is the UK’s longest-serving member of Parliament, said he and other Catholic MPs had tabled “practical objections” to the bill, along with legislators of other faiths, and said it would be “totally inappropriate” to use emergency powers to force its final enactment.
The bill cleared the House of Commons in June 2025. Leigh, a Conservative Party MP, spoke as the “assisted dying” bill was being debated in the neighboring House of Lords, amid threats by supporters to use a rarely invoked 1949 Parliament Act if it risks being delayed beyond a spring deadline.
Leigh told OSV News that members of the upper house were doing a “constitutionally appropriate job” in carefully scrutinising the bill, which was “far too complex” to be rushed through.
An independent Catholic member of the House of Lords, Baroness Nuala O’Loan, a former law professor and police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, said the bill was “extremely badly drafted.”
“As a Catholic, I believe we should be doing all we can to support life – our National Health Service exists to help people live, not to kill themselves,” she said.
