Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Murphy Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy (CB)]

My Lords, I give my wholehearted support to the Bill proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher—and I have supported all the other such Bills that have come to this Parliament in the last 15 or 17 years.

Listening to the debate, I sometimes think that we are very parochial about this issue. We must look more closely at the international evidence. I hear some deliberate misreading of the international evidence, and it is important that we pay attention to it. Recently, somebody said that this would interrupt the trust between doctors and patients. All the evidence from Europe is that doctors in the Netherlands are trusted the most.

I want to mention two other common arguments that have been repeatedly mentioned today. The first is that frail older people will be coerced into killing themselves by wicked relatives or others aiming to inherit—referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, as the “vultures”. Heavens, as a medical psychiatrist working with older people, I have come across these vultures quite regularly, but they are very easy to spot. Studies of patients who seek an assisted death in other legislations that use this particular approach, such as Oregon, Washington state and others, have demonstrated that those who seek an assisted death are not the frail and very aged with cognitive impairments that make them vulnerable to undue influence; they are far more likely to be college educated, financially secure and articulate people who have always valued personal autonomy. They have a mean age of 74, which I think is quite young, and, in the most studied jurisdictions, a very high percentage, 90% in Oregon, are already receiving palliative care or hospice at home care. Assisted dying is a very small part of good palliative care and end-of-life care in those jurisdictions; it is not an either/or.

My experience of being an expert witness in a large number of testamentary capacity cases—although, of course, sometimes the patient is dead already when I come to the case and sometimes the patient is going to die quite soon—is that undue influence and these subtle pressures never occur in patients who have the mental capacity to the high degree that is demanded by this legislation. There are usually tell-tale signs from a relative’s behaviour over the months and years before the death that the patient has been habitually exploited. Susceptible people usually have early dementia, a learning disability or, very rarely, an unusual lifelong dependence on another person. The American Bar Association showed that this was true recently.

I am going slightly over time here, and I am sorry, but the other matter arises from a recent demonstration by the University of British Columbia’s department of family medicine that people who seek an assisted death and those who are terminally ill who do not seek an assisted death both have the same rate of feeling that they do not wish to be a burden. That is an issue that is understandable and is distributed across the whole population; there is no difference between the two groups.

I urge noble Lords to look more closely at the evidence and to act accordingly to try to introduce a Bill from which so many people would benefit at the end of their lives—less than 1% but, nevertheless, an important tiny percentage of people who are nearing the end of life—to have the kindly death that they wish for themselves.