---

Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill: Select Committee Report

My Lords, I have four main points to make. First, if a Bill such as the one proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, were to pass into law, in future years it would come to be viewed as an event rather like the discovery of nuclear power when used for weapons of mass destruction, or the passage of legislation that made abortion possible. In other words, we are in the foothills of one of history’s possible ““no turning back”” moments, if we proceed down the route that the noble Lord wishes to take. Your Lordships will well remember the arguments when the Abortion Bill 1967, known as the Steel Bill, was first debated in another place—that it would affect very few people, that there would be very strict conditions, and so on. The exact opposite has turned out to be the case, with more than 5 million deaths of pre-born children since 1967. So, too, the arguments in Holland and Oregon over euthanasia and assisted dying have run. Once the laws have been passed, contrary to the stated aims of those legislators when the legislation was debated, the recognised duration of terminal illness has been unofficially extended, according to evidence of which I have been made aware. New reasons, such as dependency or isolation, have been introduced and then accepted as reasons for legitimately offering people the opportunity to hasten their own death. The problem with the Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, reminded me on a previous occasion, is that it assumes that if strict conditions are prescribed, they will be followed in practice. Good law-making cannot assume that people will behave according to the prescription of the rubric of the law so that the vulnerable will be protected. As the organisation RADAR put it succinctly in its briefing for this debate:"““Without protection, people cannot exercise true autonomy””." I say ““hear, hear”” to that. That brings me to my second point. The proposals in this Bill are not only concerned with private morality or utilitarian matters but are matters for the wider community. A positive choice sometimes has to be made in favour of protecting the interests of our most vulnerable members, even if that means limiting the freedom of others to determine our end. As your Lordships know, I am one of the simpler sorts of Peer; I make no claim to be a philosopher, although I am broadminded enough to have had philosophers among my circle of friends in the past and at present. We all know that, beat the thickets of philosophy well and hard, and it can be guaranteed that out will pop some hedgerow philosopher, willing to grease any slippery slope that your Lordships care to name. However, I have yet to find one philosopher—if they are present, perhaps they will stand up; I would be happy to give way—who does not recognise that the exercise of personal autonomy always has to be limited, if only to some extent, to enable us to live together in reasonable harmony.