My Lords, I will briefly pick up on a few points that my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff raised, and on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, on stereotyping. Quite rightly, we are spending a lot of time thinking about the process of the Bill. It is absolutely important that we get this right. However, we also have to think about what someone’s end of life may be.
I have never met anyone who wants to talk about their own death or think about the process of dying. The purpose of the noble and learned Lord’s Bill is for people to die without pain. However, we also have to remember that death, in some cases, is not a stereotype. It is not always a Hollywood death, whereby people just slip away. We have to be very careful of that.
A German documentary was shown in August 2004 about the scandal of Auhagen’s death, in which the man in question wanted to use a machine to end his life, not wanting any assistance from another person. He was hooked up to the machine, and 24 hours later, he had not died. The nurse who was with him said:
“The machine … couldn’t pump all the poison into his system. The man was partially poisoned, in agony and thrashing around in a coma, frothing at the mouth and sweating”.
That cannot be allowed.
In Oregon, some of the data have shown that in the last few days of life patients who have requested assisted suicide go through more pain than they did before the legislation was introduced because the palliative care is not there. If the Bill progresses, we cannot allow it to happen that, if someone wants to end their life, goes down the path of requesting suicide and then goes through the cooling-off period, the proper and appropriate palliative care is not there to support them all the way through.