Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Curry of Kirkharle Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am deeply concerned about this Bill and oppose it. Let me give yet another very personal insight into why I am concerned. Eight years ago, my wife and I held the hands of our daughter, aged 42, who had a learning disability, while she passed from time into eternity. She breathed her last while we held her hands. It was a very emotional and precious moment for us. It was not an experience that one ever envisages when bringing a child into the world.

Six years before that, she was very ill with pneumonia and other complications and was not expected to survive. We sat with her day and night as she struggled and battled to live. The medical staff had done what they could. Nothing more could be done. It was extremely distressing and we were torn between wishing for her to pull through and thinking that perhaps the best solution might be for her to slip quietly away so that her pain and suffering could be over.

If someone at that time had offered an assisted dying—assisted suicide—option, I firmly believe that in our heightened emotional state, not thinking rationally, we may have been tempted to agree to her premature death. Had we done that, it would have troubled us for the rest of our lives.

Remarkably, she pulled through. It was a long, hard slog, but she enriched our lives for another six years, enjoyed her own life and continued to influence hundreds of people during that time. What a tragedy it would have been had her life been cut short six years too early. That is exactly what will happen if this Bill is supported. There will be a few in the first year and a few hundred in future years who feel that they have become a burden on their families and society and will be killed off prematurely because it will become the simple, easy option.

I fear that this country will become a society that terminates the lives of its old people and its sick and disabled people because they fear they are being a burden to their loved ones and because of the time and the cost of their care. I have the same letter that the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, referred to, where a doctor wrote very eloquently. I want to repeat that phrase: “Doctors are very poor at predicting when people will die.”

We live in an imperfect, fallen world. Support for this Bill will not make it perfect. In closing, I challenge the interpretation of theology given by the noble Lord, Lord Vinson. Christ’s death was not assisted. He voluntarily offered up his life and it was the purpose for which he came.