Assisted Dying

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Monday 13th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

My Lords, all of us here have the deepest sympathy for individuals who are in the last stages of their lives and in great pain, who are seeking help to shed this life and move on. But that does not mean that we should alter the law to favour what is called assisted suicide. There are good fundamental psychological and religious principles why suicide is always frowned on by almost every society everywhere. Suicide is self-murder, and if you pull other people into that framework you are helping them to kill you, and it is a sort of murderous intention. Let us not think that the medical profession, wonderful though it is, is so spotless in all its ethics that it will not leap on the bandwagon. If you only look at Dignitas and Exit in Switzerland, for example, about a third of the people they treat—and in the case of women nearly half, I understand—are not terminally ill at all but are merely feeling rather miserable and want something to be done to help them.

I urge noble Lords not to go down this slippery slope and to recall quite seriously the early 1930s in Nazi Germany. It is all too close to home.