Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)]

My Lords, Kierkegaard tells us that life is lived forwards but understood backwards. What we do today, sometimes with the very best intentions, and what we quite rightly today think is modest and merely a step towards relieving suffering, may in time lay the foundations for things that we neither intended nor wished to happen.

I accept that facts about the future are hard to come by, but I do know one thing for certain: just as today is imperfect, just as today’s rules have been laid down and are not being followed, and just as today we find good people and bad people, so tomorrow there will be good people and bad people. There will be regulations that we thought were absolutely firm that are not followed, and there will be problems. The notion that we can pass a modest piece of legislation to deliver us the perfect future is flawed by the simple fact that the future will be just as flawed as today.

The way we approach death is deeply problematic. We try to deny it; we have hospitalised it; we try to manage it. This leaves a lot to be desired, but this Bill is not the answer to deal with those problems. I do not think that we have asked ourselves the right question, and therefore we have not come up with the right solution. We seem to assume that we can take the pain of grief out of the process of death. Our family members will feel guilty and aggrieved, whether they helped us in our last days or whether they did not. They may feel that they have not done something which they might have done. Whatever the situation, this will not take the pain out.

I must say something specific about this House. We are people who value choice and autonomy because we are a collection of people who, for most of our lives, have had choices and autonomy. We cannot assume that what we think is right for us and so wonderful and admirable will happen for everyone else on their death. The duty to be inclusive and to speak not just for ourselves, or on what we want for ourselves, is at the bottom of why we need to reflect on this legislation.

Some years ago, I asked an eminent heart surgeon what makes the difference between a good surgeon and a brilliant one. He said, “To know when not to do something”. This House has a duty: just because we could do something, does not mean that we need to; we should reflect on that. Is this Bill the answer? Will it set us on the road to the most unknown journey—the end of our life? The road to death is the one we know so little about and all fear. We all hope that it will just happen peacefully, quietly and without doubt. But it does not and, whether this Bill is passed or not, it still will not. I want us to reflect on what it is that we are afraid of and what we can resolve, and whether this Bill answers those two deep, fundamental questions. I do not think that it does.