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Assisted Dying

My Lords, I must declare a possible conflict of interest: if the law were to be changed, as I think it should be, I might wish to be its beneficiary. As all the recent cases show, the current law on assisted dying is the source of much unhappiness and misery. It is constantly circumvented, it is out of pace with public opinion and it is increasingly becoming discredited. Desperate individuals who seek relief from unbearable or unrelievable pain want to take their lives, and they either go to Switzerland, lean on sympathetic doctors or turn to botched or highly gruesome forms of suicide. The law therefore needs to change. It is obvious that we have had a lot of public and parliamentary debate on this subject. Why do we need an inquiry? I think we do because much of the debate is either not based on evidence, or based on wrong conclusions drawn from the evidence, or based on certain hypothetical fears and arguments not properly considered. We therefore need an independent inquiry that could look at the evidence more impartially. Often we are told that we do not need to worry about assisted suicide because there is palliative care, but palliative care does not address the same question. Much pain is unrelieved, and palliative care does not address the issues of dignity and autonomy, nor does it address the simple fact that one might have reached the point where one does not wish to live or to become a burden either to society or to those that one deeply loves.