Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, they said that this would probably be the hottest day of the year and, emotionally and intellectually, I think they were probably right. The noble Lord, Lord Alli, hit the nail on the head when he said that there are no absolute rights or wrongs in this; we all bring our own feelings to it and it is impossible to say something is absolutely right or absolutely wrong. The letters we have all received are so deeply moving and passionate about the perceived primacy of their position that I found them to make almost unbearable reading—particularly those, which in my case were in the majority, that recount the helplessness of watching a loved one die in agony. One farmer told me that if he allowed his animals to die in this way he would be locked up.

Consultants in palliative care, who have been very persuasive in what they have said, say that nobody should suffer in this day and age in that way. However, they still do: the evidence is there in the letters and is all too familiar to families up and down the land. As a young man, I worked for a while as a phlebotomist at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. It is strange to reflect that since those days, and in the aftermath of the appalling deeds of Harold Shipman, doctors have in many ways found themselves hamstrung in their dealings with the terminally ill and the dying. The days are gone when a country GP visiting a patient he or she has known for decades could quietly and gently ease them on their way. Perhaps some still do—I know many doctors who have done it. However, in curtailing the ability to carry out this compassionate care, through the forensic analysis of deaths, I believe we have created the need for the Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer.

We have heard very strong medical and legal arguments, which nobody of intellect could simply dismiss. I certainly do not and, rather, would love to see them used to improve the Bill, which I still support.

The church seems divided on this issue and rightly talks of the sanctity of life. There could be no greater subscriber to the sanctity of life than me, but surely part of that sanctity is constituted by—how can I put this?—a sacred stillness, a dignity, a precious humanity that is undone by rendering a dying human being into a screaming animal, a shadow of their former and real self, utterly deprived of the inalienable right of personal autonomy. Here we come to that great conundrum of faith. No one from the church or anywhere else has ever been able to explain to me how I should try to comprehend the notion that an all-seeing, all-merciful God would want this sort of terrible suffering to be endured rather than relieved.

A natural death is what we all hope for, and we would all like to think that, if needed, we would be given enough drugs to make us comfortable, but what if, to achieve that, a doctor prescribes so much morphine that it leads to depression of the respiratory system, bringing about death or, perhaps, the old man’s friend, pneumonia? My father, who had severe Alzheimer’s, got, as I prayed he would, pneumonia. I had months before asked the sister in charge that, should that be the case, please not to treat it with antibiotics. He slipped into a peaceful coma. Yet was I not in one sense part of an assisted death? Are we are not dealing in semantics in saying that a withdrawal of treatment is not actively bringing life to an end? Is this Bill not in a way simply spelling out, trying to clarify, the right of each and every one of us to have the final decision about our lives should disaster strike and to have as peaceful a death as possible?