Assisted Suicide

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I support the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) and congratulate her on bringing it to the House for consideration today. The topic is a very emotive one and I will not pretend that it is ever an easy situation for people to live through, but I was taught that not every right decision is an easy decision. We have to make right decisions sometimes that are not easy ones. Today we are tasked to take a moral stand for people who are very ill and in more pain than many of us can even begin to imagine. We in this House are commissioned to look at the bigger picture.

The law is far more than an enabler of prosecutions and convictions. It is also a symbolic system and an indication that we are protecting people. That is what we will be doing here today, legislatively in this House. The BMA has said:

“Doctors have a duty to try to provide patients with as peaceful and dignified a death as possible but the BMA considers it contrary to a doctor’s role to hasten death deliberately or assist in a suicide, even at the patient’s request.”

The first precept in the physician code is “First, do no harm.” This should also be the first section in the parliamentarian handbook. The Hippocratic oath includes the affirmation,

“I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest such counsel”.

That is crystal clear.

I read an interesting article by a doctor recently. He wrote that

“a woman in her 40s with advanced multiple sclerosis, no longer able to speak, and completely dependent on family and carers for all her activities of daily living was regularly admitted to hospital with chest infections, and on this occasion had been admitted with pneumonia that was not responding to antibiotics. Her husband said 'she would never have wanted to be like this'. The palliative care team were called to provide specialist care and advice for what was likely to be the last days of Alice’s life. Against all odds, Alice pulled through and left hospital.”

Her husband met the doctor afterwards and said that the involvement of the palliative care team meant that she and her family had received specialist care and support in the community. The doctor continued:

“This goes to the heart of the debate about assisted suicide. I have sometimes wanted to have done things a little differently, to help my patients with the benefit of hindsight. With assisted suicide, death is final. No changing of decisions—and the potential for a lifetime of guilt and regret.”

I do not believe that anyone could be so callous as to judge those who come to the end of their tether and cannot bear to suffer or see their loved ones suffer, but by the same token it is my belief that the state cannot interfere and decide when and if it is okay to end someone’s life.

[Naomi Long]

Several hon. Members have talked about the difficult decisions that people may face and the fact that if they choose to end their life, they should be enabled to do so. Is the difficulty not that if we accept that premise we must go on to the people who do not have family support to make that decision, so it ends up being the doctors and nurses—the people who are relied on for care—who have to make that intervention? Surely that is a step too far for even the most compassionate.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Lady for her wise words, with which I fully agree.

When I was at school, history was one of my favourite subjects. The history of pre-war and wartime Germany shows a clear policy—when people were old and infirm, they just got rid of them. I am not saying for one second that that would ever happen here, but when legal abortion was introduced—as the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) said—it was never thought that 189,574 abortions would be carried out in one year, 2010, in England and Wales. That is a fact. Things escalate as time progresses and my greatest fear is that people would begin to think that rather than cause their family pain, they should end their own life or have someone do that when there could still be hope of recovery or a good quality of life.

My brother was a motorbike man, and he raced bikes. He came off and was seriously injured. He was in a coma for 19 weeks and a machine kept him alive. The prayers of Gods’ people, the skills of the surgeon and the palliative care given kept him alive. He does not have full capacity, he cannot ride a bike—which he would love to do—drive a car or work, but he is at home and can interact with his family.

Macmillan, Marie Curie and Northern Ireland Hospice were all very active in delivering palliative care for my brother—and do so for others as well. I have been contacted by Care Not Killing and read through much of its information which struck a chord with me. The European Association for Palliative Care has affirmed that assisted suicide is extremely rare when patients’ physical, social, psychological and spiritual needs are properly met. It says that the vast majority of people dying in the UK, even from diseases such as motor neurone disease, do not want assisted dying. The 1,000 MND patients who die annually in the UK do so, in the main, comfortably and with good palliative care. A good friend of mine is dying. I have known him for many years, and I am well aware of the palliative care that he is getting.

Our key priority should be to build on the excellent tradition of palliative care in this country and to make the best-quality palliative care more readily accessible. Given the choice, most people would prefer to die at home. By 2020, over-50s will comprise half the adult population, so it is essential that we rethink current service provision and end-of-life care to ensure that it can meet the demands of an ageing population. In 1994, the last House of Lords Select Committee to report on euthanasia unanimously recommended no change at all. Its chairman later said that

“any liberalisation of the law in the United Kingdom could not be abused. We were also concerned that vulnerable people - the elderly, lonely, sick or distressed - would feel pressure, whether real or imagined, to request early death.”

It has been said that hard cases make bad laws, and no law allowing assisted dying could ever be controlled. I fully agree with that and urge the House to support the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Congleton. I understand the emotions around the subject, but I cannot support the introduction of a law that will continually evolve and could leave our elderly and infirm working out the sums to see if the cost of the care justifies the continuance of their life. Some may say that will never happen. I say we have to keep the legislation as it is to ensure that it never does.