Health: End of Life

Baroness Morris of Bolton Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Bolton (Con)]

My Lords, we will all of us die one day, and how we die is as important as how we live. This is about the best possible care at the end of life, and the choices which that affords. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for giving us the opportunity to debate this important issue.

As a society, we are becoming personally less familiar with death. At one time, death was an integral part of life. Most deaths took place at home, with family present or nearby. My husband and I both come from large Irish Catholic families and it was the usual practice for your loved ones to be laid out at home for family and friends to pay their last respects before burial. However, with advances in medical science—advances for which we are all enormously grateful—death has increasingly become a clinical act that takes place in hospital, often after an emergency admission to an acute ward and, sadly, all too often in isolation. We have come to believe that medicine has the answer for everything.

We cannot recreate a society from another age, and each age must shape its own way. However, it is a fact, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said, that when questioned, most people say that they would wish to die at home. We should strive to make that possible, wherever possible. That means greater investment in community care. It also means building on the investment which successive Governments have made in the development of specialist palliative care—an investment that has made this country a world leader in end-of-life care.

Those are the choices that I want to see embraced at the end of life. What I do not wish to see is the right to choose when to die, with assisted suicide enshrined in law as one of those choices for some people.

There is nothing more distressing than witnessing someone you love in pain and with little hope of recovery. I completely understand the honourable intentions of those who support a change in the law to license “assisted dying”. However, in reality that means licensing doctors to involve themselves in deliberately bringing about the deaths of some of their patients.

In the Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, now before your Lordships’ House, responsibility for assisting suicide is placed on the shoulders of doctors. However, most doctors do not want that responsibility, and nor do their professional bodies. The Royal College of Physicians has stated explicitly that a doctor’s duty of care for patients,

“does not include being, in any way, part of their suicide”.

We need to remember that the law exists to protect us all—especially the more vulnerable among us. It is hard to imagine anyone more vulnerable than someone who is struggling to come to terms with their mortality and who is worried about the impact of their illness on those they love. The last thing they need is an invitation to take their own life. Instead they need and deserve our unfailing care and protection.