Beyond mechanical acts? : Examining the provision for conscientious objection by pharmacy professionals in assisted suicide legislation in England and Wales

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Moore, Isaac (2025) Beyond mechanical acts? : Examining the provision for conscientious objection by pharmacy professionals in assisted suicide legislation in England and Wales. International Journal of Pharmacy Practice. riaf094. ISSN 2042-7174 (https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpp/riaf094)

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Abstract

Across Great Britain and the Crown Dependencies,1 there are ongoing efforts to legalise assisted suicide.2 Kim Leadbeater MP’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill would accomplish this in England and Wales. Having received a Third Reading in the House of Commons on 20 June 2025, the Bill has now progressed to consideration by the House of Lords. Assisted suicide is not, however, an ethically settled matter. There is a spectrum of views and understandings across all elements of society, including pharmacy professionals. Pharmacy professionals are a diverse group of individual moral agents (see Neal and Fovargue [2]); thus, it must be expected that for at least a portion of the workforce assisted suicide will be morally problematic (in theory and/or in practice). This article is not about the desirability of legalising assisted suicide, rather it is about providing protection for professionals who wish to opt out of providing assisted suicide should it become legal. Specifically, this article examines legislative protection for opting out by pharmacy professionals in England and Wales, in the context of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill as amended by the House of Commons. Under that Bill, the provision for opting out is not strictly ‘conscience provision’, since the bill would allow individuals to opt out of involvement for any reason, including but not limited to reasons of conscience. However, as opting out is usually motivated by conscientious objection (CO), and since that is the term used most often in the relevant literature, this article will use ‘CO’ to refer to the practice of opting out of assisted dying for conscientious or other reasons.

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Moore, Isaac ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0604-5985;
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