SCOTLAND – Faith, politics and the defeat of Scotland’s Assisted Dying Bill
30 April 2026
Guest article by Peter Warren*
The vote and what it conceals
On 17 March 2026, the Scottish Parliament voted 69 to 57 to reject the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill. Its defeat on a free vote of individual conscience raises an awkward but necessary question: when elected representatives vote in line with their personal faith against the demonstrable wishes of the people they represent, is that democracy fulfilled or democracy denied?
Approximately 75 percent of Scots consistently support assisted dying legalization across multiple polls, regardless of party, religion, or disability status. Yet only 57 of 128 voting Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) backed the bill at its final stage. Twelve who had endorsed its general principles at Stage 1 switched to opposition by the final vote. The free vote, designed to liberate conscience from party machinery, provided political cover for religiously held judgments to be presented as purely personal, ethical, or structurally problematic. A broad public majority found itself outmanoeuvred by a focused, organized opposition that knew exactly what it believed and why.
The key politicians
The role of senior politicians is important to consider. Amongst those who voted no were the Scottish National Party (SNP) First Minister John Swinney, Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes, former First Ministers Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf, and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, many of whom have well-documented faith commitments. Swinney, a practicing member of the Church of Scotland, reportedly appealed privately to SNP colleagues to reconsider, a notable exercise of informal influence for a leader whose government maintained an officially neutral position.
Kate Forbes’ role seems to have been pivotal. A member of the Free Church of Scotland, an evangelical Calvinist denomination with firmly conservative positions on bioethics and the sanctity of life. She was careful to frame her arguments in secular terms, citing coercion risk, inadequate safeguards, and fears for disabled people. She did not invoke scripture. But her public stance on other conscience issues maps consistently onto Free Church teaching, and whether her secular framing represented genuine reasoning or careful translation is a question worth asking.
Jeremy Balfour, independent MSP for Lothian, brought both faith and disability to the debate. A trained Baptist minister, former Evangelical Alliance lobbyist, and a man who has lived with disability since birth, he wept as he begged colleagues to consider the bill’s consequences for the allegedly most vulnerable. Supporters of the bill found it difficult to challenge him without appearing to dismiss disabled people’s fears.
The lobbying campaign
The Faith opposition was also notably broad. Church of Scotland members, Free Church evangelicals, Roman Catholics, Baptists, and Muslim MSPs all voted no. On this issue of assisted dying, Islamic teaching on the sanctity of life aligned with evangelical and Catholic positions across ethnic, party, and denominational lines.
Before the Stage 3 vote, senior figures from the Church of Scotland, the Roman Catholic Church, the Free Church, the Salvation Army, and several evangelical bodies published a joint letter opposing the bill. The Catholic Bishops declared that genuine compassion is not expressed through ending a life.
The Humanist Society Scotland argued that churches had access to politicians quite disproportionate to their numbers in a country where, per the 2022 census, a majority now identifies as having no religion.
The Church’s central claim, that true compassion means accompanying the dying rather than assisting their death, carries force in its proper theological context. The institutional energy directed at defeating this bill has not been matched by an equivalent advocacy for funding the alleged alternative – palliative care – that those same institutions champion.
It was notable that a key driver of the faith arguments was the need to protect the vulnerable, not least those living with a disability. No matter whether these people are and/or feel vulnerable. Pam Duncan-Glancy, the first permanent wheelchair user elected to Holyrood, articulated her fears sincerely. But the argument that a mentally competent, dying disabled person should be denied a choice available to others in identical medical circumstances, solely because of their disability, comes perilously close to the ableist condescension disability rights advocates have spent decades fighting.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the bill’s defeat was not solely a story of religious lobbying overriding democratic will. Concerns about coercion and opposition from professional bodies played real roles. But the alignment of faith-background MSPs, the coordinated multi-denominational campaign, and the informal influence of senior figures in a nominally neutral government cannot be set aside in any honest accounting. Scotland’s organized religion has lost its demographic majority. On this vote, it retained its leverage. That gap is the democratic question this vote leaves behind.
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* Peter Warren is Executive Director of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies (WFRtDS)
