Assisted Dying

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

A couple of years ago, on the near continent, a young woman of 23 years was euthanised, having suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder since 2016. Although physically uninjured, she had witnessed school friends being blown to smithereens in the bombing of Brussels airport. I put it to Members that if we use assisted dying as a therapy to end suffering for which other therapies exist, we will have made a profound transformation in assisted dying, changing it from being a means of ending suffering in death, to a means of ending suffering in life. I suggest that the trajectory is in that direction, as it has been in all those jurisdictions that have introduced it.

I debated this subject against Baroness Meacher at Durham University, at the time when she had a Bill in the House of Lords. She was determined to constrain the debate to all the provisions she had made in the Bill on safeguarding, diagnosis, the number of doctors giving assent and all the rest, but she was completely hijacked by her seconder, who was a psychiatrist representing an organisation called My Death, My Decision. They were determined that this was a therapy—a provision; a service—that should be available to absolutely everyone.

I only want to make one further point, aside from the fact that I accept we have not voted on this for three Parliaments. We should determine what our position is; I would welcome a vote, but we should be careful what we wish for. Oregon has just released its statistics for last year. By far, the largest cohort of applicants for the service—52%—are those who say they wanted it because they did not want to be a burden, far exceeding those who wanted it to avoid pain in death. There is a profound danger that what begins as a choice will end as an expectation, and so proceeding, we will end up with what Matthew Parris has said, and then it is not much of a jump to “Logan’s Run”. If you do not know what that is, Mrs Latham, google it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Farris]

I was about to respond to the intervention from my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire about consistency in the law. Yes, I agree that consistency is a good thing.

I want to touch on four arguments made by Members who hold an opposing view on this issue. The example was given of Canada, where the law was changed, and the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester, made the point that no change had been implemented; but it is true to say that in 2016, when the Canadian medical assistance in dying legislation was introduced, the threshold was whether the individual suffered from a grievous and irremediable medical condition, where death was reasonably foreseeable. What has been delayed but none the less agreed is removal of the requirement that death be foreseeable. Canada is also mulling over whether the Act should apply to circumstances in which there is no physical disease at all—in other words, where the condition is mental.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

Will the Minister allow me to intervene?

[Laura Farris]

I think I have not got very much time, so I am going to crack on; I am sorry.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

You have plenty of time.

[Laura Farris]

Well, I have been told I do not.

The other issue is evolution of the wider principle. What if a right to die evolves, perhaps slowly and imperceptibly at first, into a duty to die? My hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy put it beautifully. Once we have allowed people to rationalise the quality of their life, how do we avoid it becoming incumbent on them to do so? There are also the hard cases: some of the cases described in the Chamber today are heartrending and sound clearcut, but we cannot ignore the difficult ones. One in particular jumped out at me in relation to something that the hon. Member for Gower said: the case in Belgium of Nathalie Huygens, who ended her life because of the extreme psychological suffering that she experienced after she was raped. The hon. Lady—I mean this very respectfully—said we should give people the choice to take themselves out of suffering, but that is exactly what Nathalie Huygens would have argued she was doing. We cannot ignore these difficult cases.