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London, England, Oct 1, 2025 / 14:35 pm (CNA).
One of the United Kingdom’s leading experts in bioethics has warned that hospices may be forced to offer assisted death out of fear of losing their funding.
Pia Matthews, senior lecturer in health care ethics at St. Mary’s University, London, told CNA on Oct. 1 that if assisted dying is legalized in the U.K. this November, “there is real risk that funding to a hospice will depend on whether the hospice engages in the practice of facilitating assisted deaths, and this will put further pressure not only on staff but also on the survival of some hospices, which are already underfunded… Given that the very nature of assisted dying means that it is the cheaper option, this will inevitably have serious consequences for the funding of hospice care.”
She continued: “The argument in favor of assisted dying is that assisted dying offers choice to patients. Purely on a cost basis, choice will be taken away if hospices are not adequately funded and more people will be implicitly coerced into assisted suicide because they will feel they have no choice.”
The law on assisted suicide is expected to change in England and Wales after Member of Parliament Kim Leadbeater successfully introduced a private member’s bill in November 2024 called the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. The bill would legalize “assisted dying” for terminally ill adults with less than six months to live. Under current law in England and Wales, assisted suicide is illegal with the potential for imprisonment for up to 14 years.
Although Leadbeater’s bill passed successfully through the House of Commons, its passage has now slowed due to growing concerns about its safety and application. In a vote in the House of Lords on Sept. 19, peers voted in support of establishing a select committee to further scrutinize the highly controversial law.
Against this political climate, a report by BBC News on Sept. 29 revealed that hospices are being forced to cut services, despite growing demand.
Toby Porter, CEO of Hospice UK, told the BBC: “Over the last three years, hospice charities have seen accumulated cost pressures, but the money that they’ve received from the government has stayed flat, and that’s seen services cut back.”
“What would it say about us as a country if someone decided to opt for an assisted death because they were worried that they wouldn’t be able to get the care they needed to control their pain or manage their symptoms, or that their family wouldn’t be properly supported?”
Matthews told CNA that the very ethos of “assisted dying” was a threat to hospice care.
“Hospice care does offer real choice at the end of life: choice about where to die, who will accompany the person, treatment and care options. This model of care is under threat from inadequate funding and it is under threat from the contrary ethos of assisted suicide because assisted suicide tells people that their fears are correct — they may die in pain and no one can help them, they can only rely on themselves, and their only recourse is to go for assisted suicide,” she said.
“Where hospice care is about solidarity and hope, assisted suicide entrenches fear of loss of control and therefore despair. If assisted dying is legalized, the line between recognizing when treatment is burdensome or futile for this patient and so should be withdrawn and deciding that this patient’s life is no longer of any worth so the patient can choose to have death hastened, will be blurred. Recognizing when treatment is appropriate is good medical practice; helping patients to take their own lives is not.”
Meanwhile, pro-life campaigners in the U.K. have also echoed concerns about the future of hospices under an “assisted dying” regime.
Catherine Robinson, spokesperson for Right to Life UK, told CNA that “the apparent commitment in the form of a ‘blank check’ to fund a state-assisted suicide service, and the lack of any corresponding commitment to ensure full state funding for palliative or hospice care, risks creating a perverse push towards assisted suicide since one service could be readily available while the other is not.”
She added: “For vulnerable people near the end of their lives, it is especially concerning that assisted suicide could end up becoming the default, simply because it is available and better funded than palliative or hospice care.”
Robinson further said that “hospices urgently need more funding to perform their current duties of care.” She explained that introducing assisted suicide “would stretch an already over-encumbered sector dangerously thin.”
“It is also worrying that hospices would not be able to opt out of assisted suicide being provided on their premises,” she said. “This would likely mean that many hospices opposed to facilitating the deliberate ending of patients’ lives could be forced to close, further reducing the availability of end-of-life care.”
