Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Jopling Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, because of my respect for life, I have always been opposed to euthanasia, as well as so-called assisted dying. I should make it clear at the beginning that my views are in no way influenced by religious teaching.

My opposition to the Bill is also based on my anxieties at its consequences if it were to become law. First, there are the temptations which would arise for greedy families, who might wrongly encourage the premature demise of a distressed relative for reasons of convenience or money. I give the example of my own mother, who was widowed at 58 and went through a number of periods when ill health and temporary depression caused her to wish life could come to an end. Of course, we always jollied her out of that attitude, but I know that if we had encouraged her to end it and it had been available, she would have done so—not least because her doctor wrongly told her several times during her widowhood that she did not have long to live. In the event, she lived a fruitful widowhood and died at 96.

Finally, I am concerned that the likely consequences of what I would describe as doctors sympathetic to euthanasia and what were called in a previous debate in 2014 doctors for hire, doctors who are philosophically strongly supportive of euthanasia. When we last had these debates on the Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, to try to deal with the problem of doctors for hire, I tabled an amendment whereby no doctor could sign the certificate more often than once in four years. In fact, we did not get to debate it in Committee, but it is on the record that the noble and learned Lord recognised the problem of doctors for hire and agreed that we should discuss ways to deal with it. If this Bill should go to a Second Reading, I give notice that I shall again table an amendment seeking to restrict doctors to sign these certificates at reasonably infrequent times.