Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

My Lords, I echo the tributes that have been paid to those who have brought this legislation before the House; to those who have written to us, often by hand, with moving and compelling testimony; and to the quality of the debate. The Bill arouses strong passions, but it behoves us to approach it in as dispassionate a manner as we can. The speeches we have heard have largely done that.

There is little doubt that the Bill is wanted. I have had people come up to me in the street, urging me to support it. My postbag has been running 4:1 in favour, closely reflecting the sentiments of the general public. One woman told me her dog had had a better death than her mother; another said her grandmother died under harrowing circumstances, palliative care having proved entirely inadequate.

I want to concentrate on just one area of the debate: the impact on disabled people. It is said that the Bill defines terminal illness in such a way as to encompass large numbers of people with chronic conditions and disabilities, as well as terminal illnesses. However, this is not the case. It is a very narrowly and precisely targeted measure aimed at assisting those who are terminally ill to avoid further suffering by assisting them to take their own life. It does not license voluntary euthanasia by authorising someone to take the life of a person not covered by the Bill. It relates only to someone who is likely to die within six months and is mentally competent in making the request for assistance to die. It would not license assisting someone who is simply disabled, having, say, broken their neck playing rugby or, as in some recent cases, someone who suffers from locked-in syndrome, although there may be some overlap at the margins, it is perfectly possible to distinguish between the disabled and the terminally ill. I am disabled but I am certainly not terminally ill, as is plain for anyone to see.

It is said that the Bill gives carte blanche to anyone who thinks that a disabled person’s life is not worth living, but what is forgotten here is that, all importantly, the disabled person has to ask. Questions of the robustness of safeguards do not arise until that hurdle has been cleared. So the Bill actually protects anyone who does not have a terminal illness and it will give dying adults peace of mind. As the poster says, no more people will die as a result of a change in the law, and not just self-evidently, as the noble Lord, Lord Rowe-Beddoe, says; importantly, I would stress, fewer people will suffer.

The leaders of disabled people say that disabled people are against assisted dying, but that is not borne out by the facts. It is not just particular individuals like me who take a different view; as a YouGov poll recently found, 79% of registered disabled people, very much in line with the rest of the population, support assisted dying for adults of sound mind with a terminal illness.

The argument for assisted dying is fundamentally that it gives people choice and control at the end of life. It is curious that the leaders of disabled people campaign for choice and control in every other aspect of life but balk at it in this one. I wish to speak for the overwhelming majority of disabled people who do not welcome the tendentious advocacy of their self-appointed spokespersons but, rather, wish to see this Bill progress. I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for whom I have the greatest respect, would also want to listen to that majority and not just to the vocal and articulate minority.