Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Mobarik Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Mobarik (Con)]

My Lords, the assisted dying Bill presents one of the most profound moral and legal questions of our time: how to balance personal autonomy with the duty to protect society’s most vulnerable. It asks whether we can lawfully offer people a choice over the manner and timing of their death while preventing pressure, abuse or error that would put the frail and dependant at risk. That tension, between respecting individual liberty and safeguarding life, demands legislation that is morally clear, legally robust and equipped with uncompromising safeguards.

The Bill is presented as compassionate, but it sets us on a dangerous drift. In other countries, what began for the terminally ill has widened to include the chronically ill, the disabled and people with mental illness. In Canada, between 2022 and 2023, legislation led to a 15.8% increase under the medical assistance in dying programme. A point that has been made numerous times in this debate is that vulnerable old people could be coerced by their children or other relatives, driven by selfish interests, into prematurely choosing assisted suicide. My concern is for those who have no children because, in reality, most children love their parents deeply and would go to any length to protect and shield them. That love is a safeguard in itself.

However, many young people are increasingly choosing to remain single and childless. That is their choice, but it brings with it a deep vulnerability. If safeguards erode, we risk reaching a point where strangers, doctors, officials and even the state could decide that certain people are expendable, especially when there is no one left to protect or speak for them, and they are seen merely as a burden and a cost to the state.

The Bill leaves too many safeguards unclear. At what precise point would professionals have legal permission to end a life? How can we ever be certain that consent is genuine and not born of fear, depression or loneliness? These are not minor details; they are matters of life and death.

Let us not assume that an assisted death means a good death. We know from documented cases of state executions in the United States that lethal injections can take far longer than intended, with visible suffering. If even executions by professionals sometimes go horribly wrong, is it unrealistic to assume that assisted dying under this Bill will always be safe and dignified?

On a personal note, my late parents, who were exceptional people of strong faith, would say that the time of death, place of death and manner of each person’s dying are preordained. Far from being a cause of fear, such belief allows one to live with courage, knowing that the end is not ours to determine.

I am aware that, even as we speak, there are those in terrible pain and suffering, but true compassion is not found in offering death. It is found in ensuring that no one dies in pain or alone, with proper investment in palliative care, pain relief and social support, especially for those who have no family to care for them.

This debate is not just about individual choice; it is a question of what future generations will inherit. Whether we remain a society that protects the vulnerable and honours life in all its frailty, or whether we enable a quiet erosion of the value of life, our responsibility is to preserve the intrinsic value of every individual, which is why I cannot support the Bill.