Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Griffiths of Burry Port and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

Yes, that seems to me to present one of the problems with the Bill.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, may I offer something at this stage? The ground has been well worked in the past and I have here some of the hearings that took place 10 years ago, when we discussed this matter. The whole question of the psychiatrist was raised then. Again and again, in discussing competence, it is the psychiatrist who seems to be claiming that someone lacks it. Making a judgment about people near to death is very difficult. Some 25% to 40% of patients at the time of diagnosis, and a similar percentage at other times on the cancer journey, suffer from depression or despair, but those conditions can be reversed. It depends on when you take the decision. Indeed, a neurologist suggested that in some conditions the whole issue of cognitive impairment must be taken note of. For example, patients to the lay person might appear relatively normal but could have severe cognitive impairment and therefore be unable to give informed decisions in such an area.

The training is not just for the people that these provisions have in mind. Once we move the debate, as we have consistently through this day, into the hands of experts, we are removing from ourselves the recognition that the experience of death and dying belongs as much to the non-experts as it does to the experts. With great timidity, I have stood up to speak at this moment, having heard in this morning’s debate from some of the leading lawyers and medical people in the land, and from people with a long experience of public life. I wonder whether it is true, for example, that a judge is, at the end of the day, the person in whom we can deposit all our confidence.

I remember the debates in my childhood that took place around the movement towards the abolition of capital punishment. You have a judge and a jury in that case, counsel for the defence and the prosecution, due process and forensic evidence—justifiable or not. You have the whole process of the law brought to bear on one case and one person, guilty or not guilty. The reason we went forward to abolish capital punishment was because of the possibility of an error of judgment—that with all that happening we might have got it wrong. As a simple lay person, I simply want to say that in this area it is infinitely more likely that we might get it wrong. It is for that reason that I stand against this Bill: because of the high possibility of getting it wrong, even when judges and the top medical people are involved.

My life sees me alongside dying people from first news to last rites and, indeed, beyond last rites—I have dealt with the people with whom one has to deal when they feel that they have not done everything that they might have done for mum. These are unhealed wounds that pastoral people have to deal with on and on, beyond the moment of death.

To think of the autonomy of the person as if that alone constitutes where this debate centres is, in my experience, utterly wrong. Consequently, when I saw the amendment that refers to,

“capacity to make the decision”,

I wondered whether the capacity we were talking about was that which pertained to the decision-makers rather than to the person dying. This is an immensely complicated area and it seems to me that we must question these rather forensic points that are being made about the capacity of this person, that person or the other person. Death and dying are individual in every case, and sometimes a friend can do more good than an expert.