Shortly before the death of the assisted suicide bill on Friday afternoon, Kim Leadbeater MP, the bill’s sponsor in the House of Commons, likened the legislation to gay marriage.

“The public just want a choice. And it is a choice. It’s a bit like gay marriage isn’t it? Marry who you want to marry, love who you want to love. It’s nothing to do with anybody else,” she said.

This comment brought a rare moment of unity to the assisted suicide debate, in which supporters and opponents alike convened to dismiss it as ridiculous. Baroness Stowell, who was responsible for steering the gay marriage bill through the House of Lords and who also supports assisted suicide, criticized the comparison. Meanwhile, Dennis Kavanagh, director of the Gay Men’s Network, jested that “no one vulnerable is getting coerced into a gay marriage.”

The comparison is, quite clearly, entirely fallacious. Leadbeater’s comment attempted to convey that the assisted suicide bill gives people a choice, but this is not true. It would only offer a real choice at the end of life to those wealthy and privileged enough to have unfettered access to high-quality palliative care. Research published this year by the charity Marie Curie showed that almost one in three people in England die with unmet care needs, a figure that is expected to rise by 23% over the next 25 years. For these people, there would be no choice at the end of life; assisted suicide would go from being proposed as a rare solution to the default option for large numbers of the public.

Leadbeater’s comparison of her assisted suicide bill to the gay marriage bill also refers to choice as a way of defending the decision to bring the legislation forward as a Private Members’ Bill. Both gay marriage and assisted suicide were not Government Bills; there were also no manifesto commitments by governing parties, and both were subject to a free vote in the House of Commons. Choice, then, is given to MPs through the Private Members’ Bill process.

This is a common line that assisted suicide supporters trot out. During the final debate on the bill on Friday, Lord Falconer, the Bill’s sponsor in the House of Lords, said: “Assisted dying is not a bill which could ever have been in a manifesto because it is a matter of conscience. A Private Member’s Bill is the normal way that most issues of conscience are dealt with.”

This is a very selective interpretation of how the legislature works, especially in light of the Bill’s supporters hoping to force it through by using the Parliament Acts. The last piece of legislation for which the Parliament Acts were invoked — the Hunting Act 2004 — was originally a Government Bill that fulfilled a manifesto commitment by the Labour Party. The bill was also given a free vote in the House of Commons because it was a matter of conscience. Lord Falconer would be very aware of this fact: he was, after all, Lord Chancellor at the time.

Leadbeater’s comparison to gay marriage misses the mark on many fronts, but the starkest is this: entering into a gay marriage is a reversible decision. One is allowed to divorce. Ending one’s life by way of an assisted suicide is not reversible. It is a good thing that such a final decision was not given to the public in the absence of a real choice and in the absence of equal access to palliative care. If those in Parliament were as focused on amending the inequalities in health and care faced by the public as they were on helping people end their lives, the country would be in a much better state than it currently is.