Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Morrow Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, advocates of the Bill avow that assisting terminally ill people nearing their natural end to kill themselves is compassionate. The tragic stories which they highlight of suffering individuals make a compelling case. Which one of us is not troubled by the thought of suffering, especially when we know a time is coming when we all must face up to the painful reality of death?

However, it is crucial that we examine the assertion that changing the law to allow a medical professional to assist another’s suicide without sanction fits with our general ethos of care. We would not fathom validating or facilitating a mentally distressed person’s desire for suicide to minimise their anguish, however traumatic, and it would be deeply unethical and sinister to suggest assisted suicide to a disabled person struggling with the burden of their condition. What makes it legitimate to introduce it as an option because a doctor makes a judgment that an individual has approximately six months to live?

To choose the path the Bill sets before us would entail a radical shift in our approach to care and suffering. There would be a class of individuals whose suicides we would endorse—lives that we would no longer consider worthy or valuable enough to prohibit any involvement in ending. Once we became accustomed to inducing death as a means to alleviate suffering, what would prevent us extending its usage to those not in their last few months of life?

The Bill provides that in determining a terminal illness:

“Treatment which only relieves the symptoms of an inevitably progressive condition temporarily is not to be regarded as treatment which can reverse that condition.”


A diabetic reliant on insulin could easily be deemed to have less than six months to live without treatment, triggering the option of assisted suicide.

To present any form of medical suicide as complementary to a compassionate society is a dangerous masquerade and one that threatens to undermine the fundamental ethic at our nation’s core. The Bill would legitimise the involvement of doctors—society’s preservers of life—in the procurement of death. Legalising assisted suicide is the wrong answer to the right question: how do we best care for and support vulnerable people nearing the end of their life?

The Bill is a dangerously misguided piece of legislation which I hope your Lordships’ House will reject.