Families tell details of their loved one’s survival against odds as MPs prepare for euthanasia vote

Stories of loved ones surviving years after doctors predicted imminent death are common – yet MPs may vote for killing to prevent people ‘being a burden’

Social media users have responded to the planned vote by MPs on Friday on an opaque bill to legalise the killing of frail, infirm and terminally ill people by describing the experience of their loved one who survived against the odds despite doctors telling them and their families that they had only a short time to live.

The accounts came in response to a post on X by user ‘ToryFibs’ about a Belfast man who in 1976 was given only twenty-four hours to live but made a full recovery, recognised after two decades of investigation by the Roman Catholic church as the ‘first Irish miracle’, after touching a holy relic. The Belfast Telegraph wrote of the events:

Doctors were stunned when he recovered from severe gangrene of the bowel.

The Catholic Church has now recognised his cure as the first official Irish miracle.

Speaking in Rome this weekend, before the beatification of Edmund Rice, founder of the Christian Brothers, Mr Ellison said: ‘What happened to me was absolutely extraordinary.’

Mr Ellison was rushed to hospital in 1976, aged 19, with severe stomach pains but doctors gave up hope after extensive treatment.

Right-wing Labour MP Kim Leadbeater has tabled the euthanasia bill and MPs will vote on it on Friday. But Leadbeater’s comments have caused horror among some after she said that ‘being a burden’ would be a legitimate reason for being euthanised. Disabled peoples’ rights groups and others have raised concerns that the bill would lead to pressure on the disabled and infirm to submit to ‘assisted death’ and some have compared the proposal to the nazi protocol of killing so-called ‘useless eaters’, a conclusion entirely in line with Labour’s view that almost anyone is fit to work or can be made to enter work and that those who are not are unworthy.

X users began to respond to the ToryFibs post with their own accounts of survival, in many cases of people going on to live fulfilling lives for years after the death doctors wrongly predicted. Some examples are shown below:

The mesothelioma.com website also details people who survived terminal cancer diagnoses, in one case going on to live to over a hundred years old:

As a ‘private members’ bill, the proposed legislation escapes much of the process and scrutiny to which government legislation is subjected, leading to serious concerns that so-called ‘safeguards’ against misuse of the legislation to kill people for being inconvenient, or against them being pressured into consenting to an early death, will be inadequate.

The bill is supported by Labour right-wingers like DWP Secretary Liz Kendall, who is currently waging war on disabled people and those suffering long-term health conditions. Kendall’s boss Keir Starmer last week described benefit claimants as ‘a blight’ and has made it perfectly clear that he has no object to keeping children in poverty, making people take dangerous slimming drugs and letting thousands of pensioners freeze to death each year.

If this bill is not voted down, it must be resisted and protested until it is abandoned.

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