Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, it is now over 15 years since I last spoke at the Second Reading of an assisted dying Bill. However, I regret that I am no more persuaded by the eloquent and powerful arguments put for this Bill than I was at the time for that of Lord Joffe.

Nearly all of us come to this debate with a personal experience. I certainly do. I was a carer for my late wife, who endured a great deal of pain and suffering while undergoing all the ups and downs of five years of ultimately unsuccessful cancer treatment. She was also a doctor and she founded a cancer support charity. Despite her experience, she was of the strong view that the answer was high-quality palliative care, not the availability of assisted suicide. My heart goes out to my great friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, for the lack of that care in her case. I still hold to that view, if anything more strongly. It is not just about some of the problematic wording in the Bill regarding prognosis and settled wish to die; it goes much wider than that. It is about risks to the inevitably vulnerable and the impossibility of safely mitigating that risk, especially in the light of what the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, had to say about the future and what the noble Lords, Lord Hastings and Lord Mawson, said about the present.

When we debated Lord Joffe’s Bill, it could be argued that the Netherlands and Oregon had had their teething problems but that they demonstrated the safety and viability of assisted suicide legislation. After the passage of years, that assertion has been punctured, as the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, demonstrated. On the contrary, we can now see the real flaws in their systems and that of Canada, variously a lack of supervision, doctor shopping, a great increase in assisted deaths, greatly widened eligibility from the initial scope, and impact on investment in palliative care and charitable hospice activity. I am firmly on the side in this debate of the many people who have written so cogently and movingly in opposition to this Bill. I will vote to defeat it if given the opportunity.