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Assisted Dying

I am sorry but I will not give way. The law cannot be changed significantly in the courts of law. A number of hon. Members have mentioned various states and countries, including the Netherlands, the state of Oregon and Washington state, which has recently changed the law. The significant thing about Oregon is that, according to recent research published in the British Medical Journal, one in six Oregonians who have taken lethal drugs provided by their doctors were actually suffering from treatable depression, which the doctors had failed to diagnose. There is a danger that some people will want to go beyond terminal illness and serious long-term conditions and go to younger people and those seriously suffering from mental illness as well. Baroness Warnock said in a recent article in The Times:"““If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives, your family’s lives, and you’re wasting the resources of the NHS.””" What a statement for a peer of the realm to make! Let me remind hon. Members that some of the 700,000 Alzheimer’s patients in this country would follow the course set proposed by hon. Members if Baroness Warnock and her supporters had their way.