Legalisation of assisted suicide or euthanasia is a complex issue, transcending many fields of expertise including the law, medicine, ethics, mental health and society. Opinion polls tell us what a sample of people, who may have little or no knowledge or experience of a subject, think on a particular day and in response to questions posed without a context. Opinion polls favoured going to war in 1914 and appeasement in the 1930s. They can give us interesting snapshots of what people think on specific issues at any particular time, but it is not the job of Parliament simply to rubber-stamp them. Parliament has to look at the wider picture and to focus on the evidence.
Surveys of medical opinion - of the people who know what 'assisted dying' actually involves and who would be in the front line of implementing any such law - invariably show opposition to licensing physician-assisted suicide. In a poll of 1,000 GPs in 2015, for example, only one in seven of respondents said they would be willing to assess an applicant for assisted suicide.