Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Jay of Paddington Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jay of Paddington (Lab)]

My Lords, this is the fourth Assisted Dying Bill that I have supported in your Lordships’ House; with each one, my conviction that this is a necessary reform gets even stronger. Today, my commitment is made more passionate by one particular personal experience: the assisted death of my closest American friend, someone I used to call my sister. She had been diagnosed with terminal illness, with terminal lung disease, and she wanted to be remembered as someone full of life, which she certainly was, rather than as a debilitated cancer patient.

Her son wrote a powerful account of how she chose to end life for the Washington Post, and I quote him:

“On a Sunday evening in July 2018, my 81-year-old mother raised a small red glass to her lips. In it was a mixture of water, grape juice and a fatal dose of a medically prescribed drug … She was sitting up in a hospital bed in her Washington DC home, bathed in warm early evening light, and chatting and passing time with me, my sister and all her grandchildren … Finally, there was nothing more to say. Surrounded by family, she seemed composed and unafraid, ready to shed the anxiety, pain and humiliations that come with terminal lung cancer. Without the slightest hesitation, she drained the glass and lay back on her pillows. Within a minute, her features softened and her eyes closed. She fell into a heavy sleep, her breath audible. It wasn’t long before her breathing slowed, and then stopped.”


Some time later I went to Washington to speak at her memorial, held at a chapel attached to Washington National Cathedral. It was a traditional service led by an episcopalian minister. The circumstances of her death were clearly acknowledged and understood. Afterwards the large congregation gathered in the chapterhouse where we exchanged memories over tea and sandwiches. Nothing about that occasion was clandestine or fearful. It was a familiar ritual, the kind of comforting rite of passage that we have all experienced, this one sanctioned by the law and accepted by society and made possible by the District of Columbia Death with Dignity Act, passed in 2016.

The DC law is very similar to the one that the noble Baroness has proposed today. After three previous Bills and, frankly, decades of discussion, it is time that we acted to make this kind of civilised, gentle choice at the end of life available in our capital city and indeed throughout the United Kingdom.