Coroners and Justice Bill

With all due respect to the noble Baroness, I am not persuaded that this is a mere narrow and technical amendment. I see it as touching on concerns that ought to be at the heart of English law. I speak as the father of a 30 year-old woman with Down’s syndrome. For much of her life, she and others like her have been the subject of countless government and other programmes, apparently intended to increase responsibility and choice. However, the lived experience of my daughter’s life is that, for people like her, intention and reality often end up being far apart. With all respect to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and the noble Lord, Lord Lester, speeches about freedom, choice and personal autonomy may be fine for those, including many of us in your Lordships’ House, who are well educated, articulate and not totally economically dependent on others. We are used to shaping our lives through the autonomous choices that we make. However, I ask noble Lords to reflect for a moment on the many people, in this country and the world, whose experience of life is much more about being "done unto"—sometimes by those closest to them—and whose experience of professionals, including doctors, is not always of people of good faith, like you and me, but of remote, aloof and often faceless people who make decisions that may not immediately reflect, or appear to reflect, the client’s interests or long-term needs. I ask noble Lords to consider whether a person whose life experience is not all about being in control and making free choices is likely to see any loosening of a law that is designed to protect the vulnerable from others and from themselves as being the compassionate liberalism that we are told it is intended to be. For too many, the promise of more choice has so often turned out to mean pressure to choose that which suits others. People who have not led assertive lives, exercising their own choices, have often internalised the notion that others know best. They end up valuing their own lives far too cheaply. Are we to offer them the ultimate opportunity to give way to the will of those around them? I ask this in the context of the amendment, which by definition would involve the state in affirming the view of an individual life as being, in at least some circumstances, intolerable and not worth living. One of the prime functions of law is to protect the weak. So let us be very wary of any changes to the law that are based on an assumption that all human beings are like us: confident, articulate and used to choosing the direction of their lives. For many others, choice is not always a promise: it can feel like a threat. Time and again, history has shown that once a principle is breached it becomes very hard to police the boundary. That is my greatest worry about the amendment. Its apparent modest provision to provide support for those who have determined to seek assisted death abroad will, I am certain, despite all that has been said, come to constitute a legislative milestone on that slippery slope to introducing assisted suicide here in the UK by incremental degrees. My concern, on behalf of the most vulnerable, is that what is presented as an extension of "my right to choose" can too quickly become an option that I am pressurised, however subtly, to accept. The philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, says that the fundamental truth about human beings is not that we are autonomous individuals, but that we are dependent on one another. Through good palliative care, our nature as dependent creatures can be given an eloquent expression through the skill of the medical and nursing professions. Most doctors, and the BMA, understand the provision of palliative care as central to their calling but are extremely wary of assisted dying. The vision of our mutual dependency is surely better realised in a relationship dedicated to controlling pain and supporting life until death comes, than in the dry, consumerist image of a medical profession part of whose job is to respond to a patient’s demand to die. So often this debate about assisted suicide is presented in terms of a conflict between warm compassion and cold dogma. But this is a false antithesis and far from the reality that the debate needs to be about. The real debate is about how a compassionate society discerns and enshrines in law what "compassionate" means for all its citizens, but particularly for the weak and vulnerable, with all the complex reality of their lives, and in a way that appears to reduce neither the value of individual human life, nor the mutual responsibility of us all. This is a matter that deserves thorough debate and scrutiny in a substantive measure of its own. It is far too important to be dealt with in the loosely drawn amendment that it is now proposed to attach to this already broadly drawn Bill.