Left image: Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson speaks at SPUC’s Lives Worth Living event in Middlesbrough, Friday 4th April
Disabled people are “absolutely terrified” by proposed assisted suicide laws, Paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson told a Westminster event this week before another vote on MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.
“This fundamentally changes our relationship with society”, Baroness Grey-Thompson told a parliamentary event in response to the threat of assisted suicide. “Every disabled person who writes to me – and they do write quite a lot – is absolutely terrified about what this means for them.”
Noting that discrimination against disabled people has “risen remarkably” in recent months, Baroness Grey-Thompson questioned how coercion of disabled people into taking their lives could be spotted by authorities since they already struggled in cases of domestic abuse.
“So why is it they are going to suddenly be able to spot it in this? They’re not,” said Baroness Grey-Thompson.
The Leadbeater Bill proposes to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales for terminally ill adults given six months to live. A second MP vote at the Third Reading is set to take place on 16 May.
Baroness Grey-Thompson, one of the greatest Paralympians of all time in the wheelchair racing event, was made a life peer in the House of Lords in 2010. On 4 April 2025, she spoke out against assisted suicide at SPUC’s Lives Worth Living event in Middlesbrough.
Over 80 attendees heard about the discrimination she had faced as a disabled woman, such as being told that she shouldn’t have children, and, when she was on the London Underground, that “people like you shouldn’t use the tube when people are trying to get to work”.
“We are told that the Bill is not for disabled people, yet disabled people are very easily able to fit into the six-month diagnosis”, Baroness Grey-Thompson said on 4 April, stating further:
“We already have doctors in this country talking about terminal anorexia. If a patient with anorexia doesn’t take treatment, they could very easily have a six-month diagnosis. Someone with diabetes could fit into this if they stopped taking their insulin. For someone like me, if I had a pressure sore and it didn’t heal, I could fit into this qualification very easily.”
SPUC’s Northern Development Officer, Terry Graham, who chaired the Middlesbrough event, also warned that the Leadbeater Bill, if passed, would “fundamentally change the fabric of our society, with untold implications for the way we treat the sick and dying, and those with disabilities…
“Our message is clear: this is a dangerous bill that must be defeated, and we urge as many people as possible to urgently contact their MP to voice their opposition.”
At a hearing into the Bill at the Committee stage, disability expert Dr Miro Griffiths warned that the proposed legislation “coalesces with the systemic injustices faced by the disabled people’s communities in the UK…
“The infrastructure to support [disabled] people either to respond to [assisted suicide] coercion, or to understand that they do not have to be in that position in the first place, is non-existent.”
He continued: “Section 6 of the Equality Act 2010 states that a disabled person is somebody who has a ‘physical or mental impairment’ and the impairment ‘has a substantial and long-term adverse effect’ on their ‘ability to carry out… day-to-day activities’.
“If you have a terminal illness, it is likely that you will be defined within the terms of what is outlined in Section 6, so it is a fundamental flaw, because disabled people will be incorporated within this.”
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