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Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill: Select Committee Report

My Lords, I congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, and the Select Committee on an excellent report. Having served on four Select Committees examining Bills—chairing two of them, including the Joint Select Committee on the draft Mental Capacity Bill—I know how hard it is to keep to the terms of reference, which is the Bill itself, and to examine the principles of the issue. The committee did that admirably. Your Lordships will have seen the briefing from the leaders of the British faith communities. But the ““sanctity of life argument””—perhaps I may call it that—is not my reason for opposing this legislation. As legislators our religious beliefs are bound to inform our deliberations, but our overriding concern and responsibility should be to consider the best interests of society as a whole; that is, for those with religious beliefs and those without. In 1990, according to one survey, 35 per cent of people surveyed thought that there was always a clear distinction between right and wrong. By 2000, that figure had shrunk to 20 per cent with 75 per cent believing the exact opposite; namely, that there can never be universal standards of what is right and wrong because each judgment must always depend on circumstances. We live in a pluralist society and we must legislate accordingly. My reason for believing that this legislation would not be in the best interests of society is based on a genuine concern about the fundamental change in attitudes and belief regarding the end of life that I am convinced would result from a change in the law. In the real world, end-of-life decisions would inevitably move from the moral to the utilitarian. If the law changed, the extent or compass of euthanasia would change. The noble Lord, Lord Joffe, and others have made it clear that this Bill is only a first stage. The logical extension of the argument can be found in Appendix 6 of the report, which is the Euthanasia Statement of the Dutch NVVE. It sets out the Criterion for requesting euthanasia. The medical conditions that would come within the Criterion are quadriplegia, dementia, blindness and/or deafness, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis and other crippling but non-terminal conditions. I am not exaggerating when I say that there are many older and disabled people who are genuinely fearful of the change in the attitude of society towards them if assisted dying is legalised. One aspect of disability is rarely mentioned. There is an unspoken fear, except to each other, among parents of disabled children, whatever the age of the children may be. They ask, ““What will happen if we die first? Who will take life and death decisions if we are not there?””. Last week, at the RADAR conference which debated assisted dying, one mother described the concern expressed by her son who had a progressive and terminal condition that stretched over 30 years until he died. He required 24-hour care for most of his life. When he died he was fully competent, but, for a long time, had been concerned about the burden that he placed on his parents. Of course, they were there to reassure him. What would his attitude and that of those who cared for him have been if his parents had died first and assisted dying was an option? I know of one couple, both of whose disabled children died. Their only consolation was that their fear of dying first had been removed. I turn to what may seem to be a technical point, but is very important. The noble Lord, Lord Joffe, has indicated that he would amend his Bill to exclude Scotland. This would raise exactly the same dilemma that faced the Government when considering whether abortion should be a reserved or devolved matter in the Scotland Act. It was reserved to the Westminster Parliament on the ground that it would not be in the best interests of society to have different regimes for abortion in the two countries. The same argument applies to euthanasia. We have heard of suicide tourists to Switzerland. I imagine that we would not wish to have suicide tourists crossing Hadrian’s Wall. The Select Committee received a vast amount of evidence, but if time allows me to quote from only one submission, it should be that of the National Group of Palliative Nurse Consultants at pages 85 and 88 of Volume III:"““It is well known in the caring professions that nurses, not doctors are the clinicians who look after patients as they die. There is absolutely no recognition of this in the Bill . . . We firmly believe that the law needs no change to allow for euthanasia or any form of therapeutic killing to meet the needs of people approaching the end of their natural life. It is our view that no suffering is unamenable to relief when a patient and family and expert practitioners work together to tackle its complexities. It is our opinion, based on many years of clinical and personal experience that this Bill is fundamentally flawed and sets a dangerous precedent." That is the opinion of professionals who, unlike most of us, spend their working lives helping the terminally ill. In conclusion, I have one important question about the progress of the Bill that I wish to put to the Minister and about which I have given him notice. We all know that Private Member’s Bills which start out in this House have no chance in practical terms of reaching the statute book unless the Government co-operate over the allocation of time when the Bill reaches the Commons. If the Bill the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, intends to introduce is agreed to by this House—and that is by no means certain—and it does reach the Commons, will the Government help to find time for it there? I am sure that noble Lords will agree that the attitude to the Bill of this House as it passes through its various stages would certainly be influenced by knowing whether, to put it bluntly, it is going nowhere or whether it has a chance of reaching the statute book.