Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill [HL]

My Lords, like most of your Lordships I have received many letters about this Bill. Like my noble friend Lord St John, I soon gave up reading them very carefully. Then I learnt from the Catholic Herald that a very expensive campaign had been undertaken by the Catholic bishops, which cost several million pounds, which, of course, they are fully entitled to undertake. However, I could not help thinking that it might have been better to give the money to charities for the poor and that the bishops’ lobbying efforts might have been better directed towards Rome to support African efforts to rescind the Vatican’s ban on the use of condoms, even among partners with AIDS. The Archbishop of Cardiff has said that this Bill would ““kill off”” people. However, it will kill off very few people and the people who will be killed will be killed voluntarily, whereas in Africa many people are being killed and there is nothing voluntary about it at all. In the previous debate the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said that she did not think the Bill crossed a Rubicon. I entirely agree that it does not. Up to 1961 there would have been a good deal of logic in the case made by the opponents of the Bill because suicide was illegal. They could have argued that there was no reason why the terminally ill should be allowed to do something that the rest of us were not allowed to do. Today, of course, the case is very different. Suicide is legal and now the Bill’s opponents have to explain why those who want to kill themselves because they are terminally ill and in agony, but are unable to do so because of their illness, should not be put in a position to do so, like all the rest of us. No amount of talk about palliative care will alter that position. The trouble with the Bill’s opponents is that they ignore the reality of what happens today. After all, terminally ill patients are allowed to stop taking life preserving drugs and thus probably face many days of pain before they die, and doctors are allowed to give pain killing drugs even though they know that that will speed up the death of the patient. We also know from surveys that doctors commit euthanasia anyway, normally probably in a very good cause. So, the Bill does not constitute the crossing of a Rubicon. Therefore, I cannot help thinking that the Bill’s opponents are in the position—I quoted the following words in the previous debate—satirised by Arthur Hugh Clough, who said:"““Thou shalt not kill but need not strive officiously to keep alive””." Both because I think that the position of the opponents of the Bill is illogical and because public opinion is overwhelmingly in favour of it, I strongly support the Bill.