Health: End of Life

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, one day we will look back on our present law on assisted dying with the same wry surprise as we now look back on our past laws on homosexuality, capital and corporal punishment, abortion and, indeed, attempted suicide. Let it be remembered that we used to prosecute people who attempted but failed to take their own lives. I believe that the present law is not merciful, but merciless.

Of course there are profound difficulties in devising the right legislation, with real dangers to be avoided and real concerns to be met, and of course it is imperative that nothing is done to imperil the continuing availability of the very best palliative care for those whose lives are drawing to a close. We must recognise the vulnerability of the terminally ill and ensure that they are not subject to the least pressure to end their lives a day earlier than needs be. Obviously, assistance must be given only to those of sound mind with a clear and settled intention of ending their lives early. All these safeguards seem to me to be fully enshrined in the draft Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. If I have any reservations about that Bill, they are that it is too restrictive rather than too extensive in its application.

Let us take someone like the late Mr Tony Nicklinson, whose posthumous appeal has been heard this very week by the Supreme Court, although not yet decided. Mr Nicklinson would have been unable to invoke the Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, for two distinct reasons. First, his condition, insupportable though he found it after suffering for so long, was not terminal in the sense of dictating that he was likely to die within six months. Secondly, his case was argued on the basis that he could not himself do whatever was required actually to end his life. He needed more than assistance to commit suicide, and in fact he needed what under the present law can only be described as mercy killing. One might have thought, with his position being even more helpless than that of someone who can at least self-administer the final medication, that the law should be, if anything, the readier to allow him the choice of death.

I am, for my part, no less interested in how voluntary euthanasia is working out in Holland and Belgium, where it applies, than in how assisted dying is working out in Oregon and the various other American states where it is practised. As far as it goes, I shall certainly support the Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. Surely the underlying principle must be to promote human dignity and autonomy and to allow—always when consistent with the rights of others—the individual his choice as to how he should end his life, no less than as to how he should live it.

My final point is one that has been made, and rightly made, by a number of other noble Lords. The great advantage of the Bill would be to give the terminally ill the knowledge that they have a safety net available if things get too terrible. In some cases, that confidence and assurance—that the time and manner of their ending is ultimately in their own hands—will not only give them peace of mind but actually prolong their lives, by deciding them against committing suicide early, while they are still able to do so unaided. That, I recollect, was very much part of Mrs Purdy’s thinking in the very last case that we heard in the House of Lords as Law Lords—the subject of that picture in Committee Room 1, “The Last Judgment”. I wish the Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, the greatest of fortune.