Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Goudie Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goudie (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have sent me emails and letters, both against and for the Bill. The vast majority of the mail I have received has been asking me to vote—if there is a vote—and speak against the Bill.

In the 1970s, I had the pleasure of being introduced to Dame Cicely Saunders and going to her hospice, and I spent a number of years talking to her and helping with her. I became very involved in the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow, with which I still have close links and which has done a great deal of pioneering work in palliative care. I would like to see palliative care assisted by the Government much more, including in the home. Not everybody should have to leave home to die; most people would prefer to be in their own home.

“Assisted dying” is a euphemism. This is an assisted suicide Bill—let us call a spade a spade. Nor is the Bill about alleviating suffering. Eligibility for assisted suicide does not require suffering. Other countries have this type of legislation, with acute suffering as a condition for eligibility. In this Bill, there is a very low threshold for eligibility. There is also concern about coercion, and a vulnerable individual being manipulated into this decision.

I quote from an American psychiatric journal:

“Psychiatrists with ethical objections to assisted suicide advocated a higher … more extensive review of a decision.”


The standard for deciding whether a person has the competence to make this decision is not a scientific one. It is difficult to determine whether a person even has the mental capacity to make such a definite decision. How are we to determine standards and thresholds for deciding whether a person has a specific capability to consent to a physical assisted suicide? What happens when doctors cannot decide, or if one of the two doctors changes their mind or does not agree? The Bill poses questions about the ethics of evaluating competence when it is partly determined by the individual values of the attending doctors.

Facilitating the taking of human life is a poor solution to improving the quality of end-of-life care. As I said at the beginning of my few words, we should be putting much more effort and funds into palliative care in the home, in hospices or in a mixture of both.