Assisted Suicide

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a great honour to follow the passionate speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), and I am most grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) not only for tabling the motion but for his courtesy in writing to all hon. Members with understanding and detailed work on the subject.

I speak in support of amendment (b), in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), and I wish to touch on the issue of palliative care. My contribution arises from conversations that I have had with a great friend of mine who is a consultant in palliative care and has thought about the matter very deeply. He has drawn my attention to the work of Harvey Chochinov, who addressed the congress on palliative care in Gateshead earlier this month.

Harvey Chochinov is a psychiatrist from Canada who has researched extensively the experiences of patients who are approaching the end of their lives, and ways of helping them. His work includes research on the expression of a desire for death or a loss of will to live, which he explains is often misconstrued as synonymous with a request for euthanasia or assisted suicide.

There is good evidence that in the context of advanced illness, the desire for death can be thought of as a continuum. At its most extreme, it is synonymous with suicidal intent, and perhaps with the wish to die. Far more common are the many patients who, over the course of their illness—perhaps cancer—experience occasional and fleeting thoughts that not waking to another day may offer the escape and comfort that they perceive life can no longer afford. However, the research shows that in response to appropriate palliative care and the rallying of a community of support, thoughts about the wish to die can dramatically recede.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there are good examples of the community supporting the provision of palliative care? For example, in Medway, the Friends of the Wisdom Hospice raised more than £500,000 to support the excellent palliative care there. The community and the voluntary sector want palliative care, so we have to work with them to ensure that such excellent facilities carry on.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I thank my hon. Friend and I entirely agree with him. In my constituency, we have the great work of Katharine House and, across Staffordshire, many other places, which I applaud.

Dying with dignity involves being treated as an individual—yes, having physical symptoms such as pain treated, but a lot more than that. Good palliative care is essential and we need to recognise that for the vast majority of patients, good palliative care—including the opportunity to express oneself as an individual and to retain control over the areas of life that one can have control of—will result in a desire for life rather than death.