A vote against assisted suicide in the Welsh Senedd has been welcomed by campaigners opposed to legalising the practice.
Senedd members voted 26 to 19 against a motion calling on Westminster to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales. Powers to legalise assisted suicide in Wales are not devolved but reserved to Westminster.
Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan and health secretary Jeremy Miles both voted against the motion.
Right to Life UK said the vote sent a clear message that the Welsh Senedd opposes the imposition of assisted suicide on Wales by Westminster, which is set to consider a bill to change the law next month.
"Assisted suicide campaigners appear to have brought forward the motion with the expectation that they would have the numbers to win the vote and claim support from the Welsh Parliament for Kim Leadbeater's assisted suicide bill, which is currently before the House of Commons," said Right to Life UK spokesperson, Catherine Robinson.
"This would have given their campaign in Westminster a large boost but instead, the tactic has spectacularly backfired with the vote showing that the Welsh Assembly firmly rejects the imposition of an assisted suicide regime on Wales."
A number of Senedd members spoke out against changing the law during Wednesday's debate.
Delyth Jewell, Plaid Cymru member for South Wales East, said, "My fear with this motion—well, my terror, really—is not so much with how it will begin as with how it will end.
"There are safeguards in what is being proposed in Westminster, indeed there are, but every precedent we see internationally shows that no safeguard is sacrosanct; the experiences of Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and some states in the US show what can so easily, so inevitably, happen.
"Laws are first introduced for people who are terminally ill, as is being proposed in Westminster, and bit by bit, the safeguards have been eroded so that now people with depression, with anorexia, and many other non-terminal disorders can qualify — disorders from which people can recover, lives that will have been ended that might have got better."
Joel James, member for South Wales Central, said, "It has been repeatedly proven that assisted dying laws, when introduced, descend quickly into a range of problems, from coercion by relatives to the hand-picking of specific doctors willing to euthanise.
"It would, I believe, set a dangerous precedent and lead to a catalogue of unintended consequences if it was introduced into the UK."
Darren Millar, member for Clwyd West, said that legalising assisted suicide "would send a clear message that some lives are not worth living, and I don't think that that's a message that any civilised society, frankly, should be promoting to any of its citizens, especially when there are many people across Wales right now who are enjoying a fulfilling life in spite of their terminal illness, or in spite of a debilitating condition".
Welcoming the result of the Senedd vote, Dr Gordon Macdonald, CEO of for Care Not Killing, commented: "This is an encouraging result and proves the more people, including parliamentarians hear about implications of legalising state assisted killing the more they reject changing the law, because they see how it would put pressure on the elderly, terminally ill and disabled people to end their lives prematurely. This is exactly what we have seen in the handful of places who have legalised state assisted killing."
