Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill [HL]

My Lords, I join the debate with an average experience of seeing close friends and relations suffer as they approach death or the final stages of a terminal illness. Only a few days ago, my wife and I were in the excellent Joseph Weld Hospice in Dorchester with a friend who suffers from MND. She cannot speak and can now barely write the words that she can nevertheless articulate clearly in her mind. Even with the highest forms of palliative care, such patients are clinging to a steadily declining quality of life. It is the medial profession’s very expertise in prolonging life that gives rise to the feelings that many of us are expressing today. I have been comforted, as these patients must have been, by the knowledge that doctors continue to exercise discreet powers in the administration of drugs, albeit in a legal vacuum. It is tempting to support the status quo, even though as medicine advances the pressure on doctors to stretch their ethical standards must sometimes be intolerable. I have another friend, Mrs S, whose husband was needlessly kept alive after brain surgery against his own wishes. She wrote to me this week:"““The current law causes . . . unnecessary suffering . . . Among my own acquaintances I have personally known it to lead to amateurish and unnecessary suicides that went tragically wrong. I hear that this is not uncommon. A change in the law has become essential””." The recent experience of Dr Anne Turner and the loyalty of her family speaking on the radio moved me to look at the Bill more carefully and to consider my noble friend’s more targeted approach, because I believe that it will be used to relieve only a minority of cases of exceptional or ““unrelievable”” suffering, in the word used by the Select Committee. Assistance would be provided only where the person concerned was fully competent to make a decision. It is surely disingenuous and counter-productive of critics of the Bill, including many in the Churches, to speak of killers and murderers, impugning the genuine humanitarian motives of those who wish to relieve suffering. By using such language, they alienate those of a reforming tendency who still occupy the middle ground. Certainty is the prerogative of those, including many from the Catholic tradition, who have turned their face away from change or any attempt to look forward and learn from empirical experience. As the noble Baroness, Lady Richardson, stated well, many Christians seek security in the absolute sanctity of life, as laid down in the law of Moses. They ignore or forget that Christianity also embraces and celebrates death. Others, not necessarily humanist or agnostic, want to anticipate or even proclaim death as the completion of life. They do not need to cling to thin-spun life until the blind fury comes. They recognise death’s approach before it has the power to shock, and they want to cope with it accordingly in the most peaceful way possible. Surely that falls well within the present ethical norms of palliative care, although some advocates will not let you think so. Withholding life-prolonging treatment and assisted suicide coincide for me on the ethical compass. Here, I support the comments of Dr Evan Harris as cited by the Select Committee. Therefore, although fully recognising the growing skills in palliative care, about which much has been said, I believe that the Bill is both endorsing the status quo and giving it the force of law. Of course, there will be a legal tangle because of the potential for abuse. Some doctors and nurses will always see it as the enemy of Hippocrates. I hope that the web of potential amendments does not become an excuse for hypocrisy or inaction, which would prolong the agony of many patients deserving more imaginative care and co-operative doctors, who at present act without legal authority. I oppose the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. It would be wrong to forestall discussion on a subject of such public interest and importance.