Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Moylan and Baroness Hayman

Committee stage
Friday 13th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. I was trying particularly to get to the point of the doctor’s role. I understand what he says, and he is quite right. I was trying to advocate that doctors should be able to have conversations with their patients about care, not just medical treatment—which is the phrase he was using before—to look holistically at what that dying person wants and needs, and be able to respond to their desire not to have any more pain, drugs or treatment. The doctor should be able to talk freely about all those options. In my view of the world, that would include assisted dying, but there is a spectrum.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

There is, indeed, a spectrum, and the doctor should be able to speak. As I say, there have been 3,000 years of thought given to this. What has resulted from that is a firm conviction that, while some medications that do you good may also do harm—and the doctor has to make careful judgments about that—the active killing of a patient, the actual administration of substances with a view solely to bringing about death, is morally abhorrent.

It may not be morally abhorrent to the noble Baroness, but she has to understand the novelty of this and the violence that she is doing to our inherited moral framework when she—