Assisted Dying
Debate between Desmond Swayne and Laura Farris(6 months, 4 weeks ago)
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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.
Laura Farris
I think I have not got very much time, so I am going to crack on; I am sorry.
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.