The decision is viewed as a significant setback for the assisted suicide lobby who are currently pushing strongly for a change in UK law.
The power to introduce assisted suicide is not devolved to Wales but is reserved to Westminster in London.
The members of the Senedd – the Welsh Parliament – voted 26 votes to 19 against the motion.
The Welsh First Minister, Eluned Morgan, and the Secretary for Health and Social Care, Jeremy Miles, both voted against the motion.
“My fear with this motion – well, my terror, really – is not so much with how it will begin as with how it will end,” said Delyth Jewell, Plaid Cymru member for South Wales East.
“There are safeguards in what is being proposed in Westminster, indeed there are, but every precedent we see internationally shows that no safeguard is sacrosanct; the experiences of Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and some states in the US show what can so easily, so inevitably, happen.”
Opposition among Senedd members came from all major parties including Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Conservatives.
“Assisted suicide campaigners appear to have brought forward the motion with the expectation that they would have the numbers to win the vote and claim support from the Welsh Parliament for Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill, which is currently before the House of Commons,” says Catherine Robinson, spokesperson for Right To Life UK.
She highlights that if the vote had gone the campaigners’ way it “would have given their campaign in Westminster a large boost but instead, the tactic has spectacularly backfired”, with the Welsh Assembly making clear its view and rejecting the proposed change in the law.
“Laws are first introduced for people who are terminally ill, as is being proposed in Westminster, and bit by bit, the safeguards have been eroded so that now people with depression, with anorexia, and many other non-terminal disorders can qualify – disorders from which people can recover; lives that will have been ended that might have got better,” says Jewell.
Joel James, member for South Wales Central, said: “It has been repeatedly proven that assisted dying laws, when introduced, descend quickly into a range of problems, from coercion by relatives to the hand-picking of specific doctors willing to euthanise. It would, I believe, set a dangerous precedent and lead to a catalogue of unintended consequences if it was introduced into the UK.”
Darren Millar, member for Clwyd West, echoed such concerns, saying: “[L]egalising assisted suicide would send a clear message that some lives are not worth living, and I don’t think that that’s a message that any civilised society, frankly, should be promoting to any of its citizens, especially when there are many people across Wales right now who are enjoying a fulfilling life in spite of their terminal illness, or in spite of a debilitating condition.”