Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Empey and Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean

Friday 16th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey]

Those are things that we have to probe in Committee. That is what Committee is for. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has many worthy objectives. If the proposal that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has just enunciated works, and if the professionals who know their business feel that it is more helpful, that is terrific. That is exactly what this Committee is for. I therefore commend what she said.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, I wanted to make exactly the same point as that made by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. I will not repeat it, but I ask my noble and learned friend to consider carefully the point that she just made about the actual timing of giving any drugs that would terminate life.

I wanted to make one other small point about something that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said earlier about thinking that doctors were overoptimistic about survival rates. My own experience of this, which the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, referred to at the beginning of this debate, was exactly the reverse of that. Right at the beginning of a very late diagnosis of leukaemia, my husband was told that there was only a 20% survival rate for that form of leukaemia and he was unlikely to be in that 20% because of the late diagnosis. Five years later, he received a letter, having gone through the dark hours of the night wanting to end his life in very much the way that the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, alluded to in others but has obviously steadfastly and gallantly resisted herself. The letter said that, in fact, the survival rate had not been 20%, as he had been advised, but 47%—more than double what the survival rate was meant to be.

I simply make the point that terminal illness is hard to define, whatever we put into legislation. The fact is that medical science is moving fast, particularly in the treatment of cancer. These definitions are enormously difficult and I would ask noble Lords to reflect on the fact that survival rates can be very much higher after a relatively short period of time.