My Lords, I will speak very briefly. I intended to preserve my first intervention for an amendment to which I have attached my name in the second group, but a couple of things have been said in this excellent debate that we should reflect on and that need a little clarification. It has been said that the Bill is not about doctors or lawyers, but about patients and patients choosing to die. That is not the case. The Bill is about others being permitted to contribute to a patient’s death. This is not the dying Bill, but the Assisted Dying Bill. It is imperative that we focus our attention on the rules and safeguards that would be applied to those who will contribute to a particular patient’s death.
In his very moving speech, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said that people simply want out. I understand that entirely and I absolutely respect it. Some people will of course have religious objections to that. I do not. I get that, I understand it and I do not believe that anyone should stand in their way. However, this is not just about people wanting out, but about people wanting others to help them through the exit. That raises fundamental issues of ethos in a number of professions. As the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, has said, this is a significant issue for the medical profession. I am not a member of it, but I have family connections and have spoken to many doctors—some of them relatives—on this issue. There is huge concern about it. I will expand on those issues in a later amendment. However, we should not concern ourselves with who in this House feels compassion; we all do. I am sure that we are all very sympathetic to the motives behind the Bill. As I said at Second Reading, I have the profoundest respect for the people who have brought the Bill forward and for their motives. However, I also have the profoundest reservations that, in attempting to do something good, we may in the process do something that will be much more harmful in the long run.