Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

My Lords, it seems to me obvious that the law has to be changed. We are often told that it works well, but the trouble is that Directors of Public Prosecutions change and the law is not stable. The guidelines are therefore not stable and uncertain. It is clear that we do need to change the law; that is what we are being offered in the Bill.

It is sometimes said by those who are hostile to the Bill that the number of people involved is very small and therefore those people who are suffering have to be sacrificed, as it were, for the sake of the common good and for the rest of society because of our attitudes to the dying and so on. However, it is not completely clear to me that the numbers are so small. They are certainly not particularly small at the moment as palliative care is not, alas, available to everybody. It has been estimated that there are as many as 30,000 bad deaths a year for those who have no access to proper palliative care. Even if the numbers were much smaller than that and even if palliative care were evenly distributed and easily accessible, it still seems to me very hard to say that we know people are suffering but they have to put up with it as any attempt to alleviate that suffering will adversely affect an uncountable number of other people who will be put at risk. That is the core of a great many of the arguments that we have heard.

On that point, the older one gets the more one is told that one is vulnerable. Of course, everybody is vulnerable as far as that goes, but there is one form of vulnerability that I do not fully understand. It is somehow thought to be wrong that people who are approaching death and are terminally ill should take into account the suffering, expense and misery they are causing to their family as they are being a burden. Of course, they are also a burden to the state. Why is it that this is thought to be a wrong motive, or part of a motive, for wanting to end one’s life when it is coming to an end anyway? I totally agree with Matthew Parris, who wrote in the Times on Wednesday that if he were terminally ill that would certainly be a large part of his motive for wanting to die. I completely agree. For all of one’s life up to that stage, altruism is regarded as rather a good thing, a virtue. If one sacrifices oneself in a modest way for one’s family, that is also thought virtuous. I do not understand why one should not be allowed to exercise that virtue at the very end of one’s life, and not have it assumed that this is an idea that has been put into one’s head by somebody else. It is not; it is there already.

Finally, there is a point that is quite difficult to make. People sometimes talk as though life were a kind of stuff, which perhaps has been given by God, but whether it has or not, it is a kind of stuff that is valuable in itself, rather like water. We might well be told to save water at all costs. There is no life whatever that is not lived by some living creature. If a person, a human being, has decided that his life has no value, that he does not like it and that it is hateful to him, then he and he alone is in the position to say whether it is valuable. I do not think there is such a thing, such a stuff, as life that is abstract and common to everybody. Everybody has his own life and values, each for himself.