This summer Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) will be taking on our most controversial campaign yet as we fight the Assisted Dying Bills going through Parliament. We will highlight the severe dangers that the legalisation of assisted suicide poses.

DPAC is probably best known for our campaigns against Atos — the company that profits from pushing disabled people off benefits through punitive assessments — and to save the Independent Living Fund, a source of essential support for disabled people with high support needs. We have always had to resort to direct action to get attention for our issues which are otherwise neglected by the mainstream.

This time the fight against legalisation of assisted suicide is even more complicated by the emotive nature of the subject and the fact that many of our natural allies tend to assume they are in favour. We aim through our campaign to bust the myths and show how legalising will remove, rather than give, choice and add to disabled people’s oppression.

On September 11 MPs will get to vote on this controversial subject for the first time in 19 years when Rob Marris’s Assisted Dying Bill has its second reading in the House of Commons. Meanwhile a nearly identical Bill proposed by Lord Falconer is making its way through the House of Lords. This parliamentary determination to legalise assisted suicide tramples all over the views of the people who will be most affected by legalisation — health workers and disabled people.

The Bill places decision-making with doctors, yet surveys have shown many would be unwilling to engage in such practices. The British Medical Association and Royal Colleges of Physicians, GPs and Surgeons are opposed to a change in the law, as are 90 per cent of palliative doctors who specialise in the treatment and care of people with terminal illness.

Three-quarters of GPs oppose assisted suicide with reasons given including fears that a change in the law will result in less focus on investment in palliative care and the dangers of patients feeling pressured into choosing death.

An “assisted dying” law sends the message that if you are terminally ill, ending your life is something that it is appropriate to consider. Meanwhile it discourages investment in palliative care and treatment, as evidenced by the case of Barbara Wagner in Oregon, a 64-year-old diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. Her oncologist prescribed chemotherapy to slow cancer growth, reduce symptoms, and extend her life. The Oregon Health Plan however would not cover the costs for her chemotherapy prescription, but sent her a letter saying they would instead pay for assisted suicide drugs.

Statistics show that, as with welfare reform or capital punishment, the majority of the public is apparently in favour of legalising assisted suicide on the grounds they want to help those in pain. However, the idea that the Assisted Dying Bill is a response to pain is false. Lord Falconer admitted this on BBC’s Daily Politics when he said that his Bill was not needed to help people in pain — because “that can be dealt with” — but to assist those who found the idea of losing their independence and having to rely on other people to be “intolerable.”

In Washington state, 61 per cent of people who opted for assisted suicide in 2013 said that being a burden was a reason to end their lives. Similarly in Oregon for the same year, 93 per cent cited “loss of autonomy.”

Feeling a burden and lacking choice and control over your own life are concepts only too familiar to disabled people, and never more so than in the current climate as the government attacks every area of our lives from income and benefits to the social care support we rely on, to our human rights. Proponents of assisted dying in this country have cited the “unaffordable explosion of dementia and age-related illness” as reasons to change the law. Evidence around the world shows that legalisation for one group leads to a pushing of the boundaries to bring other groups within its remit. People with psychiatric conditions, dementia and newborns with impairments are among those killed by euthanasia in the Netherlands in increasing numbers year on year.

A “right to die” already exists in this country. There is no law against refusing medical treatment that might prolong your life. Where that happens, doctors have a duty to ensure that patients receive proper pain relief and other symptom management.

What doesn’t exist for ill and disabled people is a right to independent living and to the support we need to take part in society with the same life chances as other people. Before we give disabled people assistance to kill ourselves, we want the assistance to live.

In 1912, Russian revolutionary Yevgeni Preobrazhensky wrote: “It seems to me that all suicides in circumstances of hunger and need have the undoubted character of murder... The question of a right to suicide will only make sense in a future society where no material motives for suicide will exist. Only in a society that has guaranteed to all its members the means of existence will the question be appropriate.” This remains as true today as it was then.

• To support the campaign against legalisation of assisted suicide or put your name to our statement please contact [email protected]. We will also be protesting outside Parliament on September 11 and invite everyone we can to join us.

nEllen Clifford is a member of the national steering committee at Disabled People Against Cuts.