This is our chance to bring dignity, safety and choice to dying in the UK

20 June 2025, 14:17 | Updated: 23 June 2025, 07:35

As someone who is living with a terminal illness, the vote on Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill has the potential to completely change my life – and my death, writes Sophie Blake.

I am living with secondary breast cancer, which had spread to my lungs, liver, abdominal lymph node and pelvic bone. This diagnosis is devastating enough, but I live with the fear that I will suffer in pain in my final days.

I know that palliative care can give many people a peaceful and pain-free death, but sadly that is not the case for everyone. I have seen many friends and family members suffer horrible deaths from cancer, even with excellent care. I am allergic to most opioids and worry that my pain won’t be controlled.

My friend Paola Marra had bowel cancer and travelled to Switzerland to have an assisted death. She had to die in a foreign country and spend thousands to have that choice. She died alone as she was terrified that anyone who accompanied her would be at risk of prosecution. Paola didn’t deserve a lonely death. Her posthumous plea was for a law change, and it’s time we did her justice.

In my campaigning for law change I have met people whose loved ones who have taken their own lives in awful ways because they were denied the safe and compassionate choice of assisted dying. This is a tragedy, and we cannot let it continue, but it will if we do not change the law.

I love my life and I am focusing on making memories with my 18-year-old daughter Maya and my loved ones. For me, this is not about wanting to die, but to be able to live the rest of my life with the peace and comfort of having choice. I don’t want to suffer and I want my daughter’s last memories of me to be of happiness and wonderful times, not being left traumatised by seeing me in agony.

MPs have spent many months and hours of debate on this Bill. I believe the law being proposed is safe, workable and as been drawn from decades of international evidence and best practice.

It gives people like me the choice we are so desperate for. When they come to vote on Friday, I urge MPs to remember all of us whose deaths depend on this Bill becoming law.

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Sophie Blake - Campaigner for the charity Dignity in Dying

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