Dame Esther Rantzen has described it as a “tragic day” after MPs rejected the assisted dying bill, which she has tirelessly campaigned for.
The Childline founder and former broadcaster, who is terminally ill with cancer, issued a plea to MPs to vote in favour of legalising assisted dying for England and Wales on Friday.
Speaking to the BBC via her daughter’s phone outside parliament, she said: “I’m so sad that people in this country won’t have the choice so many terminally ill adults in other countries have of shortening their own deaths by asking for help.
“I am sure a change in the law will come. I am deeply sad that it won’t come soon enough for many of the people who need it.”
Her daughter, Rebecca Wilcox, who also fought for the law change, said she was devastated by the vote, but would not stop campaigning.
She said: “I don’t think it’s a vandalism of democracy, I think it’s a demolition of democracy.”
Dame Esther has been a vocal proponent of a law change since she found out she had terminal lung cancer in 2023.
MPs voted down the legislation 286 to 270 in a dramatic U-turn on Friday, after previously backing it 314 to 291 in the last Commons vote on the issue in June last year.
The draft legislation had proposed allowing terminally ill adults in England and Wales expected to live for under six months to apply for an assisted death, provided it receives authorisation from two medical practitioners alongside a specialist panel.
Dame Esther announced in December 2023 that she had joined Swiss assisted dying clinic Dignitas, but revealed earlier this week that she was “too physically fragile” to travel to Switzerland to end her life.
She said: “Everything I didn’t want to happen I’m having to go through now, which means that the people I love and care about either cannot visit me, or when they do, see me suffering pain or indignity which will inevitably get between them and our shared happy memories, and may even overwhelm the way they think of me.
“Obviously, I would prefer that my end could be swift and painless and I could ask for help now I’m dying. But I can’t. I knew it would be like this if I died in this country because the current criminal law preventing anyone to help me shorten my death is messy and cruel.”
Labour MP Lauren Edwards, who re-introduced the legislation after it ran out of time earlier this year, called the result “hugely disappointing” and “heartbreaking” for terminally ill people and their loved ones who had been “given hope when the Commons voted for this bill last year”.
She previously warned it could be another decade before the issue came before parliament again if the legislation did not pass.
Among those who opposed the law change were the leader of Catholics in England and Wales, Archbishop Richard Moth, who called it “wrong in principle” and “deeply flawed” as well as the Church of England’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally.
Campaigners against the proposed legislation said it contained inadequate safeguards and that it could result in some of society’s most vulnerable being at risk of coercion and choosing an assisted death because they feel like a burden.