Another Labour Party MP has said that Andy Burnham is right that the care sector needs to be fixed before any debate around legalising assisted suicide should take place.

Just weeks before Second Reading of the new assisted suicide Bill on 11 September, Douglas McAllister, the Member of Parliament for West Dunbartonshire, has argued in support of the Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s latest statement on assisted suicide, in which he expresses serious reservations about making assisted suicide legal when end of life care is in such a poor state.

McAllister, who voted against the last, almost identical, assisted suicide Bill, said his “concerns have not gone away”.

McAllister’s article came after the Prime Minister said that the debate around introducing assisted suicide should not take place in a context where palliative and social care remains poorly funded, confirming “that’s the position I will stick to”. 

“I take the view that that debate – and I don’t say that there shouldn’t be a debate at some point about those issues – personally, I think there’s something that needs to happen first. That is the fixing of the funding of palliative care and social care”, Burnham said.

McAllister argued that it is correct that Parliament should “first aim to provide the care that [terminally ill people] need to live out their last days well” before any possible legalisation of assisted suicide were to take place. 

The MP explained that the assisted suicide Bill brought forward in the last session of Parliament by Kim Leadbeater underwent many months of scrutiny in the House of Lords. The recent Bill brought forward by Lauren Edwards is an almost identical copy of the Leadbeater Bill, meaning that, if MPs vote it through at Second Reading on 11 September, “we once again face months debating the same issue that dominated headlines and divided colleagues and communities last year”, McAllister observed. 

America's Democrats seem to be gripped by the cult of death. Massachusetts Democrat Gov. Maura Healey signed a new law Monday eliminating the need for specific medical justifications for abortion past 24 weeks, establishing effectively unlimited abortion up to birth in the state.

Under previous state law, an abortion may only be performed past 24 weeks if a physician deems it “necessary to preserve the life of the patient”; “necessary to preserve the patient’s physical or mental health”; “warranted because of a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis”; or “warranted because of a grave fetal diagnosis that indicates that the fetus is incompatible with sustained life outside of the uterus without extraordinary medical interventions.”

Such exceptions, pro-lifers have long warned, give abortionists ample wiggle room to authorize late-term abortions under false pretenses. But H. 5595 would do away with even those conditions, replacing the language with “an abortion may be performed by a physician based upon the professional judgment of the physician.” It would also add language that “no medical review process shall override the professional judgment of a treating physician and a patient or the patient’s health care proxy to provide an abortion consistent with the new section.”

The state’s radically pro-abortion governor signed the law in a ceremony Monday surrounded by women (some wearing white doctors’ coats) who clapped their hands in celebration.

In a major setback for the assisted suicide lobby ahead of the 11 September vote on the revived assisted suicide Bill, the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has said that the debate around introducing assisted suicide should not take place in a context where palliative and social care remains poorly funded, confirming “that’s the position I will stick to”.

The assisted suicide lobby had relied heavily on the previous Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, publicly backing the previous Leadbeater assisted suicide Bill – with the previous Prime Minister voting in favour of the Bill and giving it time to be debated in Parliament. 

This likely swayed a number of Labour MPs to vote for the previous Bill – with the BBC reporting that Sir Keir’s support was privately cited by Labour MPs as a reason they voted for the previous Bill.

Only 12 MPs need to change their minds for the new assisted suicide Bill to fall.

Seven MPs from Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats who had backed the previous Bill at Third Reading have already said they do not support plans to force it into law via the Parliament Acts / bringing back the Bill in this new Parliamentary session. 

This major intervention from the Prime Minister will likely move a number of Labour votes to oppose the Bill, meaning that Lauren Edwards now faces an exceptionally difficult uphill battle to pass the Second Reading vote on 11 September. 

An MRP poll of over 10,000 people, the largest public poll conducted on assisted suicide since Kim Leadbeater’s Bill was introduced in October 2024, has shown that there is no mandate from the public to revive Leadbeater’s failed assisted suicide bill and circumvent the House of Lords to push it into law.

Legalising assisted suicide came rock bottom of a list of voters’ priorities they want their MP to focus on if they have the opportunity to make a law change (e.g. through a Private Members’ Bill) over the next year, with half the support of the next lowest scoring priority. Asked to select three priorities, just 7% of the public and 7% of Labour voters consider assisted suicide a priority.

In line with Burnham’s position on assisted suicide, in every single constituency in Great Britain, the majority of voters agreed that Parliament should prioritise fixing the NHS and improving palliative, social and end-of-life care before considering whether to introduce assisted suicide.

 A 83-year-old Christian grandmother with cognitive problems has been euthanised despite her stated opposition and against her family’s will through Canada’s euthanasia program in July.

According to her family’s horrifying account, great-grandmother Brigitte Stegemann had lived in an Ontario long-term care facility for the final two years of her life. She originally explicitly stated that, due to her Christian beliefs, she didn’t want to be euthanised. About five months before her death, she had been diagnosed with untreatable Stage IV stomach cancer.

While her granddaughter — named Brigette in her grandmother’s honour — who held legal power of attorney was away on vacation, the medical team convinced Stegemann to request euthanasia or “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAID).

“The facility initiated the renewed MAiD discussions with a patient who had declined,” noted Kelsi Sheren in her Substack report, “The Last Ten Days of Brigette ‘GG’ Stegemann.”

Sheren listed the ways that staff at the facility quietly worked toward planning Stegemann’s demise without her family’s knowledge. 

“The facility’s staff conducted the private meetings while the advocate was away. The facility’s manager completed the application. The facility’s personnel witnessed the signature,” wrote Sheren.  

“At every load bearing point where the law imagines independence, the same institution appears initiator, facilitator, scribe, and witness while the one genuinely independent party, a Power of Attorney of twelve years, was kept, in the family’s phrase, in the dark despite their constant physical presence at the home.”

Writing at the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition’s blog, the family recounted a troubling July 6 meeting with staff:

Our family attended the scheduled MAID meeting expecting to discuss the process with GG’s physician.

Before the physician arrived, an administrator and a registered nurse from the facility entered the room and advised us that the doctor was running behind schedule.

During this conversation, which took place entirely inside GG’s room in her immediate presence, Brigitte asked who had arranged the MAID meeting. No clear answer was ever given. Instead, the family was met with an immediate wall of defensiveness, specifically from the registered nurse. The nurse informed the family that staff had met privately with GG on two occasions during Brigitte’s 10-day vacation to discuss MAID.

Brigitte asked why those discussions had been initiated when GG had previously declined MAID due to her Christian beliefs. She asked point-blank whether these conversations were initiated by GG herself or by the facility staff.

The registered nurse became physically agitated and defensive, wagging her head back and forth as she spoke directly to Brigitte, stating, “I’m advocating for her.”

When Brigitte pushed further to find out exactly who brought up the conversation about MAID, the nurse snapped, “I don’t need to tell you anything.”

Of course, the global elite's depopulation obsession goes all the way back to Malthus, but this piece from the archive puts the attitudes of the presnt day Net Zero fanatics and enthusiasts for everything from abortion to the Iran war's fertiliser disruption into perspective.

In 1995, now Editor-in-Chief of LifeSite, John-Henry Westen, wrote this report on the 1995 State of the World Forum in San Francisco that was hosted by former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and attended by many of the world's elite. The theme of the conference was “sustainable development“.

World’s elite gather to talk depopulation

By John-Henry Westen, September, 1995

San Francisco gathering draws all the big names from the world of politics, media, business and entertainment

A few months ago in late September 1995 a group of stellar performers from the world stage got together in San Francisco to discuss the future of the planet.

The “State of the World Forum” was convened by Mikhail Gorbachev, along with co-chairs President Askar Akaev of Kyrgystan, former President of Costa Rica Oscar Arias, former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Prime Minister Tansu Ciller of Turkey, former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers and Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu.

Over 400 of the rich and famous attended the gala affair which lasted 5 days and cost a whopping $5,000.00 per person. Political notaries included former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, former U.S. President George Bush, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, South African Vice President Thabo Mbeki, and even our own former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

The media representatives included such big names as newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch, anchorman Ted Koppel and cable-TV billionaire Ted Turner.

Big names in big business also attended the affair including Men’s Wearhouse CEO George Zimmer, Archer Daniels Midland CEO Dwayne Andreas, Microsoft wizard Bill Gates, and computer tycoon David Packard.

The main theme of the forum was “sustainable development,” understood by many to be a long-standing euphemism for population control.

The obtrusive promotion of the culture of death began the conference as former “Humanist of the Year” Ted Turner addressed the audience. Given only five minutes for his opening address, Turner couldn’t refrain from blurting out population control slogans in his outspoken style: “But by ending the cold war, and reducing dramatically the threat of nuclear annihilation, we now have the chance to starve to death in a desert. We have given ourselves that opportunity, and it seems that is more difficult to deal with because it requires more forethought, and the benefits of ending the cold war were perfectly clear to everybody. The population problem and the environmental destruction that is going in the world, and will eventually lead to our demise, if it is not reversed, is much harder to see because it happens over a longer period of time.”

When Gorbachev spoke, after being lauded by former Secretary of state George Shultz, he candidly revealed the purpose of the conference: “We have, I believe, to gear consumption to people’s cultural and spiritual needs also through culture and education and within the framework of laws, we shall have to address the problem of controlling the world’s population.

Amid other topics such as global governance, global security, and the information highway, the theme of population control continued. However, no where was the theme more evident than in the discussions around religion. Not surprisingly a conglomeration of Buddhists, Wiccans, dissident “Catholic” theologians, and New Age Spiritualist permeated the conference.

These included Fritjof Capra, Jeremy Rifkin, Willis Harman, Deepak Chopra, Robert Muller, Matthew Fox, Carl Sagan, and Shirley MacLaine. These types had mainly Christianity to blame for the so-called world population dilemma.

In the closing plenary session of the forum, philosopher/author Sam Keen provided a summary and conclusive remarks on the conference. Among the conference participants, said Keen, “there was very strong agreement that religious institutions have to take primary responsibility for the population explosion. We must speak far more clearly about sexuality, about contraception, about abortion, about the values that control the population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis.

“Cut the population by 90 percent and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage”, said Keen.

One brave and good man stands between the babies of one of the smallest countries of the world and the gruesome tools of the abortionists.

Abortion activists are pushing once more to legalise abortion in Liechtenstein, the tiny German-speaking country landlocked between Switzerland and Austria. It is the world’s sixth smallest country and one of the wealthiest; a constitutional monarchy with one of the highest standards of living in Europe. It also boasts one of Europe’s strongest pro-life regimes.

Abortion is illegal in almost all cases, with limited exceptions when a woman’s life is at serious risk, or in the case of sexual assault. Advertising for abortion is also restricted, and a handful of women — about 40 — travel to Switzerland or Austria each year to procure abortions. Previous attempts to legalize abortion have failed due to the resolute pro-life convictions of Liechtenstein’s royal family, the 900-year-old dynasty that has ruled the country since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.

In 2012, a referendum on legalizing abortion until 12 weeks as well as in the case of fetal deformity was proposed. Several weeks before it was scheduled to be held, Hereditary Prince Alois, a devout Roman Catholic, stated that he would exercise his royal prerogative and veto any change in law that permitted abortion. The referendum resulted in a vote of 51.5% to 48.5% against legalising abortion.

Abortion activists claimed that the results had been a consequence of the prince’s intervention. Within the constitutional monarchy framework, the ruling princes hold veto powers over laws and hold a range of other powers, including the right to convene or adjourn Parliament. Tensions between the ruling prince and parliament resulted in a referendum in 2003 that confirmed and enhanced royal veto power.

In response, abortion activists launched a citizen’s initiative to curtail the power of the ruling princes in 2013, proposing that their power to veto future referendums be limited or removed. Prince Alois stated through his spokeswoman that his previous intervention had been “a clear signal that abortion isn’t an acceptable solution for an unwanted pregnancy,” and that if the people voted to limit his royal veto, he would step back from his royal responsibilities by leaving the country entirely.

In a devastating defeat for the abortion movement, 76% of Liechtensteiners voted to uphold the royal veto.

Over a decade later, they are trying again. The “Fristenlösung für Liechtenstein” (“Time-limit solution for Liechtenstein”) is an initiative backed by pro-abortion groups such as Women in Good Health, the Free List, and the Women’s Network that proposes once again to decriminalize abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, remove the ban on providing information about abortion, and cover feticide under health insurance. On July 31, organizers submitted 4,970 signatures (well above the 1,000-signature threshold) for a new initiative.

Campaigners claim that a majority of citizens are with them. But as abortion activist Gabriella Alvarez-Hummel put it grimly in the Guardian, there is still one insurmountable problem: “A prince is standing in the way.”

In a column published on August 3, Alvarez-Hummel writes, “It should be a done deal. But no matter what the people say: the hereditary prince has already announced that he would veto any change in the law, long before a single vote has been cast.”

As she noted, Prince Alois had previously only threatened to use his royal veto a single time: In 2011, when a proposal to legalize abortion was last put to referendum. In June, he threatened to use it for a second time for precisely the same purpose: protecting pre-born children.

The Vatican is more favourable to an anti-Christian elderly punk abortion-advocate than it is to the SSPX and other devout Catholics. That's the only thing we can conclude from the latest event to shame the Catholic church. The so-called “Godmother of Punk”, Patti Smith, has opened the Holy See’s Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

Together with Soundwalk Collective, Patti Smith presented what she referred to as “Sonic Prayer” in the Church of Santa Maria di Nazareth, known as the Church of the Scalzi, for the exhibition project promoted by the Dicastery for Culture and Education, according to Vatican News.

Smith recited poetry “invoking the Virgin Mary and the birth of Jesus,” and “performed new songs written for ‘The Ear is the Eye of the Soul,’ an ensemble of new commissions by 24 artists, presented by The Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See.” 

“If we have the calling of an artist, we cannot run away from it because we will be drawn back,” Smith told her audience during the exhibition. “It reminds us that it is our mission to communicate, within our body of work, the visionary imagination. To create work that will incite, excite and inspire the people.”

Other artists who performed along with Smith at the Holy See Pavilion included FKA Twigs, whose performances are often sexually explicit, and Brian Eno, a musician, sound designer and record producer who used to style himself androgynously.

Smith is a singer, songwriter, and poet known for her influential early role in shaping punk music. Her fame peaked in the late 1970s with her biggest hit, “Because the Night,” a sensual song that declares the “night belongs to lust.” One of her best-known lyrics is “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”

The secular artist has publicly supported legal abortion. In 2018, she said that “saving the lives of young women is more important than any ideology” in the belief that legal abortion, which kills unborn babies, “saves the lives” of mothers by preventing them dying by performing abortions themselves.

In 2022, Smith called the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade “terrible” and said it broke her heart.

Instead of giving exposure to musicians like Smith and FKA Twigs, who have promoted sin in their music and public remarks, the Vatican has the opportunity to showcase and meet with artists who promote the Catholic faith like the “post-punk” band Hallowed, which promotes orthodoxy and good morals while appealing to the youth.

Similarly , Pope Leo XIV could have met with representatives of the Society of Pope Pious the Tenth, but chose instead to meet this washed up, pro-death, punk.