Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill [HL]

My Lords, I wonder whether this is really a good moment in history to be promoting a Bill which would directly legalise suicide, and almost certainly have the indirect effect of making it more respectable and even in some cases encouraging it. I realise that there are huge differences between the suicidal atrocities that we have witnessed in recent years and the suicidal feelings of sad people, conscious of failure, who feel driven by a desire to take their own lives. I have no wish to question the intentions of the legislation before us, which I am sure is seen by its promoters as providing a purely beneficent solution to otherwise intractable problems. But suicide, by whatever means and in whatever circumstances, is still suicide. One of its alarming characteristics is the strange attraction that it can exercise over people who, for whatever reason, feel depressed, insecure and unwanted. There are occasions when suicide can be presented as noble, unselfish and imbued with a macabre kind of romanticism. There is also the well known copycat phenomenon, whereby one suicide breeds more of the same. In the locality where I live, we have recently had a tragic instance of this, where one young man committed suicide by driving his car very fast into a wall and, within a month or so, was followed by another doing exactly the same to exactly the same wall. There is a kind of fascination in suicide which can be enormously tempting to people who are in any way unstable or depressed. Suicide also has a deeply wounding effect on those whose love and care is rejected. They wonder whether the victim of suicide was really asking, ““Do they actually want me out of the way?””. Those are some of the reasons why I worry about having formal approval of suicide written into the statute book. We can add what safeguards we like but we will have changed the way in which suicide is viewed. We will have given it an acceptable moral status which it has never had before. We will have identified it as an acceptable means of escape, and thus will have made it more natural and more inevitable. The same kind of problem would arise were we to give approval to euthanasia by direct killing. The point has been made again and again that either means of death would in the long run change expectations, and damage trust in and undermine the culture of medicine and terminal care. That is why it is not enough just to amend the Bill, well intentioned though it is. The problems lie not so much in the details as in the underlying principle. The only wise course, therefore, is to reject it.