Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I rise in trepidation. Having canvassed extensively on the etiquette of a maiden speech for your Lordships’ House, the advice was legion: be funny; spend a good proportion of your time explaining your background and how you got to this place; do not talk on contentious issues or say anything that could be considered controversial. So here I am, talking on one of the gravest and most personal of issues, which encompasses and bisects faith, family, love, pain, medical ethics and the sanctity of life itself—what it means to die, what it means to live, what agency we have over our own existence and what role the state plays in protecting life, prohibiting choice and prosecuting those who have been left behind.

It is not the place, therefore, for a long CV or my best stand-up material. So I find myself breaking political convention—not for the first time, and, in truth, not being able to guarantee that it will be the last time, either. But there was one piece of advice on maiden speeches that I did take wholeheartedly, and that was to thank all those who have welcomed me to this place: the doorkeepers, who have with unfailing courtesy explained so many of the place’s ways and kindly directed me as I found myself lost yet again; all staff, both party and parliamentary; and those colleagues who have extended a welcoming hand. I thank them all.

I come here after a decade serving in the Scottish Parliament. The reason I wanted to speak in today’s debate, brought forward by my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, is that I have voted on this issue in Holyrood on another Private Member’s Bill six years ago, and it has nagged at my conscience ever since. It was not, I may say, the Bill brought by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, but a subsequent one. In truth, the manner of the Bill’s drafting was so poor that many of us, myself included, were able to strike down the text without ever fully taking on the difficult, emotional or conflicting subject matter. My Christian faith, the position of my Church and the views of my sister, an NHS doctor, all played a part in my voting against. Even at the time it felt like cowardice. Every life change and signpost since then has pointed me in only one direction: it is time for the law to change.

The intellectual arguments have not changed. It is surely wrong that people seeking release are kept in pain; that every eight days a terminally ill Briton travels to Switzerland to end their life; that that route is open only to those with the £10,000 to pay for it; that up to 650 terminally ill people in the UK end their life at home with no medical oversight; and that many more try and fail. For me, it was something more personal and elemental. First, it was going through the process of IVF and the ability to have such agency at the start of life. The systems and processes of egg retrieval, embryo implant and choosing donor materials, sifted by everything from eye colour to family medical history, blow apart the mystique of birth as something uniquely God-given or planned. It has always struck me as a great conundrum that my Church has so little to say on the 50,000 people in the UK who choose medical interventions to start life but much to say on those desperate for agency over their own end of life.

The second thing that changed my thinking was watching a number of people close to me develop dementia and seeing the person they were being consumed by a disease that stripped them of themselves. Like IVF, this seems a tangential point, as no one with a cognitive impairment would come under the scope of the Bill; in fact, they would be expressly prohibited. But it made me consider that to have the body able and the mind slowly dissolve is one thing; for the mind to stay clear and the body to be crippled in unendurable pain, with the certain knowledge of a slow-death outcome, where the law says “Endure you must”, goes beyond conscience.

I conclude by thanking those I spoke to ahead of today’s debate: the doctors, the patients, the relatives they left behind. I particularly want to thank a 37 year-old woman called Kit with advanced stage 4 cancer, who told a group of MPs and Peers that “It feels unfair that those who don’t have a terminal illness are making decisions on behalf of those of us who do”. For myself, I think there is a greater imbalance. Those such as Kit who wish this—who desperately want it—are not imposing the same outcome on those who do not. But those who are arguing against are denying others even the choice. That is an imbalance that we here can start to address.