Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, I am against the Bill, but I think it right that your Lordships are debating it and the issues to which it gives rise. The decision ought to be made eventually and in due course by the elected House, but the debate that has taken place in the nation at large has not yet been adequate to enable society and Parliament to come to a final view.

If I were terminally ill and in great distress, I would want to be assisted to die—or I think that I would. So I am not wholly opposed to the principle of physician-assisted suicide. However, that I might want that choice for myself is not a good enough reason for me to vote for the Bill. We are more than autonomous individuals; we are members of society. In many circumstances, there are things that we know that it is right to forgo for the benefit of others, and my legal right to be assisted to die would mean the vulnerability of others.

Safeguards are crucial and those in the Bill are wholly inadequate. The language of “coercion or duress” fails to capture the insidious, abusive pressures that family members and carers can bring to bear. The term “mental capacity” fails to capture the growing guilt and collapse of self-worth that may lead people to come to the view that they should not continue to be a burden to others. The doctors whose responsibility it would be to certify that the criteria have been met cannot be in a position to assess whether such pressures have occurred. I wonder indeed whether any effective safeguards are possible—but of course this ought to be examined in Committee. The very existence of a legal option of assisted dying would itself constitute an additional pressure.

Of course we should be deeply compassionate to the people in the predicament that this Bill seeks to address, but another form of compassion would be to invest in high-quality end-of-life care for all.

If the Bill becomes law we cross a Rubicon. We would have made it legal deliberately to terminate the lives of our innocent fellows before their natural term. To legalise is at least to go a long way to normalise, even to routinise. I am worried about a progressive coarsening of the sensibility of our society. I am sure that if the Bill becomes law it will distort the ethos of the medical and nursing professions. “Thus far and no further” may seem to be rock solid today, but it will crumble tomorrow. There will quickly be pressures of compassion and economics—so many dependent people, so little public funding available—to extend the scope of the legislation. It will be a short step to legislate for physician-assisted suicide for those suffering great distress with non-terminal illness, and then other short steps to euthanasia for infants born with disabilities or people with dementia. A course of events of this kind is what has been seen in Holland and Belgium, where, incidentally, reporting and monitoring have become lax. We have heard that in the state of Oregon the proportion of candidates for assisted dying who are referred for psychological evaluation has fallen.

I may give offence in what I am about to say and, if that is the case, I would very much regret it. However, I do not think that it is indecent, irrelevant or extravagant to note that history shows that periodically there are aberrations in societies from the norms of kindness and respect for life. There have always been spiritual, intellectual and political leaders available to justify the burning of heretics and witches, pogroms and genocides, and the elimination of so-called degenerates such as homosexuals and mental defectives, as well as the enemies of the revolution. We have seen the horrors in Bosnia. We see today the horrors in Syria and Iraq. Civilisation is always fragile. We look back into history and look around our contemporary world at these psychosocial madnesses with horror. I would look forward with horror to a society in which it became normal to expedite the deaths of the very old, the gravely ill and the incapable.

That, of course, is not what the authors of the Bill wish for, nor does anyone in this House. However, the authors of the Bill invite us to take a crucial step along that path, which could lead us a very long way from where we want to be.