Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill [HL]

My Lords, we are about half-way through a debate that has been immensely impressive and informative on both sides of the argument. I particularly empathised with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Winston. A week ago, I was with a friend who has suffered greatly in recent years. He has suffered enough to induce him to make more than one attempt to end his own life. He said to me, ““I’d never heard the phrase ‘palliative care’ until very recently. And it has made all the difference””; and so it has—to the whole argument. If we were still talking about dying in pain, I might have been much more inclined to accept the case for a change in the law. But I cannot in all conscience do it for what seems to be a quite different concept—for what the Select Committee called ““existential suffering””. Assisted dying in that context can all too easily come to mean accelerated dying, instead of what surely must be much more acceptable for family and for patient: tolerable dying; bearable, dignified dying. Just what that means was made clear to me by journalist and broadcaster Daisy McAndrew’s account of the recent death of her father, Alistair Sampson—a lifelong friend—in St John’s Hospice, the only independent hospice in central London. This extract gives a flavour of the article:"““The hospice staff never patronised my father or anyone else in the family and managed to make the process dignified and special. We never doubted how much they cared for him and for the rest of us. My dad was delighted and comforted by them. Their honesty and intelligence in the way they cared for him enabled him to be on the very best form he could be””." Contrast that with the Select Committee’s deeply depressing description of the typical Oregon applicant for medical assistance with suicide. It states that,"““they want control of the dying process and wants to avert having to be cared for in a way that is offensive to them””," and that,"““they find being cared for to be intolerable””." For me, those quotations, far from making the case for accelerated death, make exactly the opposite case for continued enhancement and increased availability of palliative care. It is that which needs to be achieved nationwide, and certainly there should be an end to the current postcode lottery. There should be more hospice and community care, and more state resources for that, not more suicide. For me, St John’s Hospice makes a much stronger case than the state of Oregon. I cannot support the Bill.