Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Morrow Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, we have heard much in this debate today about choice and compassion, so it is perhaps not unreasonable to look carefully at some of the claims we have heard as well as examine the noble and learned Lord’s Bill and ask ourselves to what extent it accords with these principles. We are regularly told by proponents of the Bill that there is overwhelming support for allowing assisted suicide. The contention that between 70% and 80% of the public support this Bill is presented as a foundational justification for the Bill before us today. But how robust is that? Polling conducted last weekend by ComRes for the charity CARE and published by various media outlets today, including the Telegraph, confirms that 73% of people support assisted suicide while 12% oppose it. However, when people are informed about the various public safety considerations, those figures change dramatically. Some 42% of those who initially supported the idea of assisted suicide change their minds. The end result is that the 73% in favour to 12% against becomes 43% in favour to 43% against.

Facts are what matter in this debate. When people are presented with the facts and the complex reality of assisted suicide sinks in, it is clear that there is no apparent consensus among the populace that the proposed change is desirable. Then we are assured by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, that his Bill facilitates assistance for suicide for terminally ill people and no one else. But if compassion is an underlying principle of his Bill, where does that leave people with distressing, incurable illnesses that are not terminal? On what grounds does the noble and learned Lord exclude them from something that he clearly sees as a benefit?

Again, if autonomy and choice are underlying principles of the Bill, where does that leave people who are suffering but physically unable to end their own lives if supplied with lethal drugs for that purpose? I say this not as a supporter of the noble and learned Lord’s Bill—far from it—but to highlight the fact that inconsistencies such as these cause many people to worry that a law to assist the suicides of terminally ill people will not stop there.

We do not have to look far to see that happening. In Holland and Belgium, assisted suicide and euthanasia are now being offered to categories of people such as those with mental health problems and children who were not intended to be recipients when those laws were enacted only a few years ago. The noble and learned Lord will no doubt say that his Bill is modelled not on Dutch or Belgian legislation but on the assisted suicide law in Oregon. But let us ask ourselves what is the more appropriate comparator for assessing how an assisted dying law would work in this country—a small, sparsely populated and largely rural state on the far side of America or a densely populated and urbanised country just across the North Sea on the edge of Europe?

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, a writer and graduate student who advocates for disability rights and justice, writes:

“Advocates for death with dignity believe that they can put enough safeguards in place”.

However, what happens to people who are sick, in pain and alone, who do not realise that they have worth? They do not realise that we can fight the idea that it is better to be dead than ill or disabled. Their reaction to fear cannot be surrender, not when life is at stake.

Pressure on vulnerable people at the end of life is not novel or imagined, it is very real. It is truly life or death. We have already been warned in the press last week by Professor Theo Boer of the regulators of the Netherlands’ euthanasia law not to go there by changing our law. He was a supporter of the Netherlands’ euthanasia law when it was passed 12 years ago, but soaring death rates and elastic interpretation of the law have convinced him that the mere existence of a law licensing assisted suicide for euthanasia is an invitation to resort to it. Fear of dying, or even of dying badly, should not be motivation for assisted suicide but motivation for improved care. As proof, Boer warns, the issue of assisted suicide represented in the Bill before us today is a genie we should not let out of the bottle.

Many today have made reference to their postbags. I, too, have a postbag, and mine is running at 20:1 against the Bill. I am not talking about Northern Ireland as a region; I am talking about the whole of the United Kingdom.