Safeguarding Silence: Assisted Dying, Faith, and the Danger of Misread Consent

by The Panda

Briefing for MPs, Government Lawyers, and Legislative Drafters

This article is not a moral appeal for or against assisted dying. It is a safeguarding analysis directed at those responsible for drafting, scrutinising, and ultimately operationalising legislation.

The central risk identified here is not misuse by bad actors, but misinterpretation by well‑intentioned professionals operating under pressure. English law already rejects the inference of consent from silence, acquiescence, or withdrawal in end‑of‑life contexts. Any legislative framework that permits this inference — explicitly or by omission — will sit uneasily with established principles of consent, capacity, and procedural fairness.

Parliament should proceed on the basis that:

• Dignity in death cannot compensate for the erosion of dignity in life.

• Capacity assessments alone do not safeguard agency.

• Silence is a safeguarding signal, not evidence of autonomous choice.

What follows sets out why these distinctions matter and why the Assisted Dying Bill, as currently conceived, risks asking professionals to cross lines that the law has carefully drawn over decades.

The Assisted Dying Bill is no longer progressing with the confidence of a settled moral consensus. What is increasingly visible instead is unease — not only among faith groups, disability advocates, and safeguarding professionals, but among some parliamentarians who initially supported the legislation. That shift matters. It suggests that risks once treated as theoretical are beginning to look structural.

At the centre of this discomfort lies a safeguarding problem that has been hiding in plain sight: the systematic misreading of silence, acquiescence, or withdrawal as autonomous consent.

When restraint is mistaken for choice

English law has long drawn a careful line between limiting treatment and endorsing death. A Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR) order, or a ceiling‑of‑care decision, does not express a wish to die. It marks a boundary on clinical intervention — nothing more.

Yet experience from healthcare, social care, and post‑pandemic scrutiny shows how quickly this boundary erodes in practice. Once a ceiling of care is set, patients often encounter reduced safeguarding escalation, diminished professional curiosity, and subtle shifts in how their continued living is framed. These are not isolated failures; they are systemic pressures.

The Assisted Dying Bill risks accelerating this erosion by inserting assisted death into an environment already prone to conflating non‑resistance with consent. That should concern legislators.

Silence is not neutrality — it is a safeguarding signal

Trauma‑affected individuals and neurodivergent individuals often communicate in ways that are poorly understood by systems calibrated for articulate resistance. Reduced speech, delayed responses, flat affect, or apparent compliance may appear to be calm acceptance. In reality, they may reflect exhaustion, shutdown, learned helplessness, or communicative barriers.

English law already rejects the inference of consent from passivity. In R (Tracey) v Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust and Winspear v Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, the courts confirmed that DNACPR decisions engage fundamental rights and require active, meaningful consultation. Montgomery v Lanarkshire establishes that consent must be dialogic and informed — not assumed from compliance.

A legislative framework that permits silence or withdrawal to be read as settled choice does not advance autonomy. It contradicts settled law.

Faith is not an obstacle — it is a safeguard

One of the most persistent omissions in the assisted dying debate has been the marginalisation of faith care. For many patients, faith provides not dogma but structure: a language for suffering, a sense of relational worth, and resistance to the internalised belief that dependency negates dignity.

Where legislation fails to require active engagement with belief, moral injury, and spiritual distress, it does not become neutral. It becomes selective. Patients whose resilience is rooted in faith may be particularly vulnerable to being misread as consenting when, in fact, they are surrendering.

Safeguarding law already recognises coercion where individuals adapt their expressed wishes to what appears available — whether in domestic abuse, detention, or institutional settings. End‑of‑life decision‑making is no exception.

Dignity cannot begin at death

Political discourse around assisted dying is saturated with the phrase “dignity in death.” It is a powerful phrase — and a revealing one. If we are capable of mobilising this level of moral concern at the point of death, we must ask why we are so much less exacting about dignity within life.

Many individuals most likely to be affected by this legislation have already endured years of dignity‑erosion: inaccessible healthcare, disbelief of pain, bureaucratic hostility, and the quiet violence of being treated as administratively inconvenient. By the time death is framed as a choice, dignity has often already been depleted.

Safeguarding cannot begin in the final weeks of life. It must be structural, relational, and earlier — or it is not safeguarding at all.

Intermediaries, not advocacy alone

This distinction matters. Advocates are typically tasked with helping individuals articulate decisions within an existing framework. Intermediaries are trained to recognise when a person’s ability to express preference is compromised — and to slow the system down accordingly.

In criminal justice, we already accept that vulnerable defendants may require intermediaries to prevent distortion of their voice by trauma, neurodivergence, or power imbalance. It would be incoherent to accept a lower standard of protection where the consequence is irreversible.

Legislation that relies on advocacy without intermediary‑style safeguards risks producing processes that are procedurally tidy but substantively unjust.

The Bar of England and Wales: custodians, not technicians

This brings the issue squarely to the legal profession. British constitutional culture has never treated the Bar as a neutral delivery service. Barristers are not merely advocates for outcomes; they are officers of justice trained to recognise when process overwhelms substance.

There is an unfashionable but enduring image of the barrister as a civic guardian — disciplined, restrained, and willing to hold the line when expediency tempts collapse. St George is not remembered for slaying complexity, but for confronting it.

As assisted dying is debated, the Bar Standards Board and the Bar Council face an implicit question: what is a barrister for? If the role becomes one of facilitating irreversible outcomes without the courage to pause, question, and resist, something essential is lost.

This is not a call to moral crusade. It is a call to professional identity.

British values, properly understood

British values are often invoked but rarely defined. At their core lie suspicion of unchecked power, procedural fairness, and protection of the vulnerable, even when doing so is slow, uncomfortable, or politically inconvenient.

A society committed to those values should be wary of legislation that resolves suffering by narrowing the range of lives we are prepared to accompany.

Dignity is not something bestowed at the moment of death to compensate for its absence in life. It is something practiced — patiently, imperfectly, and collectively — long before the final decision is ever placed on the table.