Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Herbert of South Downs Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

My Lords, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?”—so asked the title of the 1970s play which examined the issue of voluntary euthanasia. The implication is clear: it is my life, and so my right to decide.

Similarly, today, many noble Lords have relied on the principle that the right to choose to end one’s own life should be paramount. The campaigners outside the House are waving banners demanding choice. I respectfully submit that this approach is flawed. If choice or personal autonomy must be respected above all, we would support many more suicides than those of the terminally ill. Of course, we do not.

By definition, every person who commits suicide chooses to take their own life, yet we usually do everything we can to dissuade them. Suicide is surely not a human right. It has not been a crime for 60 years, but the principle that any suicide is wrong and should be prevented—that it cannot lawfully be assisted—has remained, and for good reason. Once that principle is abandoned, what then will constrain the choice to die?

This short Bill does not do a small thing. It introduces in our law for the first time the idea that a patient’s life may be taken, albeit with their consent. Life, in some circumstances, is no longer to be protected by an inviolate principle, but rather by administrative safeguards and term limits.

The fear is not only that those safeguards may prove inadequate, that vulnerable people may be exploited and encouraged to end their lives and that, in reality, choice over death has been given to others, or that the time limits are essentially arbitrary, it is also that the safeguards will steadily be eroded. Once the utilitarian argument has asserted itself, we will move inexorably towards a world where the worth of life is measured and questioned. Today’s reform facilitates only the assisted suicide of the terminally ill. Tomorrow’s, as the experience of other jurisdictions warns us, will inevitably extend the right to die to others. Perhaps the terminally miserable will be included. Why not? Do they not suffer too? No principle could any longer stand in the way of such change because the main principle will already have been conceded. Extending this new right to die will merely be the next logical step—all too easily justified. Doubtless, we will be told that it is popular.

We have heard many powerful arguments for this measure today, driven by compassion and reason. However, we cannot—we must not—legislate on the basis of sentiment, certainly not without regard to the consequences. In truth, we cannot legislate away suffering. We can and should do more to alleviate suffering through better funded and more palliative care. I oppose the Bill as I opposed the Bill six years ago in the House of Commons, not because I am deaf to the moving expressions of humanity we have heard today, but because legislating to permit the taking of a patient’s life so obviously crosses the Rubicon. I shudder to hear the stories of those who suffer terribly at the end of their lives. I shudder more at a response that will open the door to ever more lives being brought to an early end.