Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Masham of Ilton Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Masham of Ilton (CB)]

My Lords, on a visit to Mexico some time ago I succumbed to Montezuma’s revenge, a violent type of diarrhoea and sickness. When the doctor came, he was the most important person in my life during that visit. I felt so wretched and helpless, because when a paraplegic becomes ill with something such as Montezuma, it is much worse than if one is able bodied. The doctor explained what Montezuma was. He was kind and understanding and he gave me the appropriate medication. I had full trust and confidence in him.

If the Bill becomes law, many countries that admire our health system might follow suit. I would then not have confidence that a doctor would want to get me better. He might think that the best solution was to give me, a paraplegic feeling terrible, a lethal injection to put me out of my misery. A few disabled people want assisted suicide, but the majority do not. They want to live. The Bill makes them feel vulnerable. There should be adequate care so that they can live decent lives and die a peaceful death. How much research has there been of the results of dying by lethal injection?

In 1970, many of your Lordships and Members of another place worked very hard on the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Bill, which became an Act of Parliament, to give disabled people a better life. We must not go backwards and give up treating them, considering them worthless human beings. The relationship that elderly disabled people and children have with their doctors should be one of trust and help; doctors should not becoming killing machines. We who live in the north shudder when we think of what Dr Harold Shipman did to many of his patients. He killed them in their own homes; they were not protected from that monster. There have been other patients killed with insulin by nurses in hospital.

The Bill could, with good intentions, lead to opening doors wider, with dangerous consequences. Dr Theo Boer, the veteran European watchdog in assisted-suicide cases, sternly warns the UK not to legalise euthanasia. He said that legalising assisted suicide is a slippery slope towards the widespread killing of the sick. He says that in his native Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002, the number of such deaths doubled in just six years. This year’s total may reach a record 6,000. A surgeon has written to me—I received the letter today—saying that, if the Bill becomes law, it could become a means of clearing elderly sick patients from hospital beds and killing off difficult ones to save money. Surely we must protect the vulnerable.