Patients in hospices will not be protected from offers of assisted suicide, even in religious-run homes, according to critics of a proposed bill going through the UK Parliament.

On Friday the House of Commons rejected an amendment to protect hospices from having to provide assisted suicide on their premises.

While advocates of the bill implied that the amendment was unworkable, Professor David Albert Jones, Director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, said that without it, the Bill “would allow doctors to raise the issue proactively with patients, and to provide patients with lethal drugs, and be present with patients when they took these drugs, all within the walls of a Catholic hospice or nursing home”.

He added: “Voluntary aided hospices would have no legal way to avoid becoming suicide clinics. Catholic patients would have no safe haven where they could receive palliative care without the threat of being offered assistance in suicide”.

“Hospices could be compelled to provide assistance in suicide or forced to close. This Bill not only threatens the right to life of vulnerable patients, it threatens freedom of conscience and freedom of religion”.