Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Grey-Thompson Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I start by drawing your attention to my entry in the register of interests. I speak in today’s debate as an atheist, a disabled person and someone who has watched both her parents die.

I oppose this Bill because I am a disabled person. I will explain the three different ways I am treated, which gives me a unique perspective and comparison. The first is as a Paralympian: I represented my country with great pride and I am treated very well because of it. The second is as a parliamentarian, where people like or do not like me based on my opinion. That is very simple. But the third is far more complicated, and that is as a disabled person. It is where I experience most and significant discrimination.

We do not live in an equal society. This Chamber has spent considerable time looking at coercive control. Why do we accept that in domestic abuse legislation but assume that in this legislation it would never happen?

We have to look at the wider context of life for many disabled people in this country. I cannot get on many forms of public transport without the approval of a non-disabled person. Airlines ask me to fill in forms that ask whether my impairment is offensive to others. Based on that form, they decide whether I am allowed to fly. In recent times, we have challenged airlines that tell me I am not allowed to fly my own because I am not a responsible adult. We have an unemployment gap. Care packages are being cut. During the pandemic, “do not attempt resuscitation” orders were put on hundreds—that we know about—of disabled people with no underlying health conditions. The Government have a strategy that recognises this inequality.

People have asked me why disabled people are not protesting outside in greater numbers. First, it is hard to get to London on public transport, but the other point is very simple: because of the pandemic. Those who are noting little opposition outside simply do not understand the risks some disabled people have to take every single day of their lives just to live. There are many organisations around disability, but there are 12 run by disabled people, andhey do not support this legislation. They are concerned about the potential backlash of it, and organisations run by disabled people really struggle to get any funding whatever.

As a disabled person, I have been told that people like me should not be allowed to have children. When people list the things that they could not bear to live with, such as incontinence, it upsets me, because what does that say about me? I am incontinent. Does that mean that my life has less value? I certainly do not feel any loss of dignity when I catheterise myself or have to use suppositories. This is something that can be very easily managed.

Many people have also said to me, “If my life was like yours, I would kill myself.” I have a huge amount of privilege in my life, but if people think this, it becomes very easy for them to conflate disability and a six-month diagnosis, and decide that we have no right to live. Serious consideration and sense check must be given to conscious and unconscious bias before the Bill can proceed.

It is not a simple Bill. Cambridge University Press has shown research on the impact on doctors of legalising assisted dying, and in 2019, the Royal College of Physicians noted that 24.6% of doctors were willing to do it, but only 5% of palliative care physicians. If we look at other jurisdictions, Belgium and the Netherlands, it is simply not right to say that where the legislation exists there is good palliative care. There has been no growth in palliative care in those two countries since 2012. In Canada, only 15% of people can access publicly funded palliative care at home.

We have heard a lot today that there is great public support for the Bill—around 80%—but that drops considerably when its details are better understood. Some 57% do not know what “assisted dying” means and 10% of those who believe that the law should change believe it actually means better hospice care. I believe it is fundamentally wrong to have assisted dying on the NHS when there is no right to palliative care. We must improve that. This is not a modest Bill and I do not support it.