Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, we have heard today the views of some doctors, but we know that their views are not unanimous. Indeed, the position of the Royal College of Surgeons was decided by just 26 members of its council, not by a ballot of its members. The BMA is against, but the BMJ is in favour. The churches have helpfully supplied their views but, as we have just heard from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Carey, they are also not unanimous.

I say, with enormous respect, that whatever the position of medics or clergy, the decision is not for them, much as we welcome their input and advice. Medicine has let us plan our families and, mercifully, medicine has helped our coming into the world, making it much less painful for our mothers. For our departing this world, are we really to be denied the help of health medicine—as it was, for a time, denied to women in childbirth? Historically, some Christians believed, as Genesis says:

“In pain you shall bring forth children”.

Early medics thought that chloroform could complicate births, with a very respected professor, Professor Meigs, saying at the time that painful contractions during labour were,

“natural and physiological forces that the Divinity has ordained us to enjoy or to suffer”.

Luckily, Queen Victoria would have none of that and gratefully accepted chloroform for the birth of her ninth child. The rest, as they say, is history.

The lesson, of course, is that it is the patient—in this case, the dying and their families—who we should hear: those such as Grace Hall, who saw her granddad and aunt suffer, so wants people to have life-ending medicine to self-administer when they choose; Joanna Carrie, who would like to have it there for herself; Kathleen Muir, herself a devout Christian, who does not want to hear of people having to throw themselves down stairs in order to die; Don Lane, who saw his father suffer terribly; Mr Hood, whose wife Camilla died of lung cancer; Pearl Prisley still, in her words, “torn apart”, by not having helped her father,

“the strongest and bravest of men, a war hero”,

when he begged her to end his misery; and Garth Weston, haunted by memories of his mother’s final pain as she prayed each night not to have to face another day. The lesson surely for us is to listen to those voices.