The upper house of Britain's parliament blocked a controversial law on Friday to allow doctors to help terminally ill patients end their lives.
The assisted dying bill would let doctors prescribe lethal drugs to patients suffering unbearably and have less than six months to live. The patients themselves would have to administer the drugs.
A human rights lawyer Lord Joel Joffe said- "We cannot sit back and complacently accept that terminally ill patients who are suffering unbearably should just continue to suffer for the good of society as a whole".
Supporters say terminally ill people should have the right to end their suffering, while opponents, including religious leaders, say life is sacrosanct and the law could be abused. Some opponents said that such a bill cannot guarantee that a right to die would not, for society's most vulnerable, become a duty to die.
A survey for Dignity in Dying, a pressure group that backs the proposed law, showed three-quarters of people supported assisted dying as long as safeguards were in place. But a Sunday Telegraph newspaper poll found 65 percent thought that if the law was passed, "vulnerable people could feel under pressure to opt for suicide."