Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Moylan and Lord Moore of Etchingham

Committee stage
Friday 13th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

I am perhaps imagining the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, as a quivering wreck. If that is how she feels, you can imagine what it is like for most of us when we face our doctors, so the point was made very strongly.

There are so many good amendments here and I cannot possibly refer to all of them, but I want to drive home, by force of comparison, a point that arises from two things that were said—one by the noble Lord, Lord Rook, and one by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, who is no longer in her place. The noble Lord, Lord Rook, said that there is no duty under the Bill to raise assisted dying, which is obviously true. It is very important to pursue what that implies.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, said that by raising assisted dying a doctor is not performing a neutral act, so the question we have to ask is what is going on when a doctor proposes assisted dying. I am saying that if it is not a neutral act it is an ideological act, and that is not something appropriate for a professional.

I shall draw a comparison that will illustrate that point. The Government keep promising to introduce a Bill to ban conversion therapy—and I think that they will do so. The objection to conversion therapy is that it is a form of coercion of the weak and of exploitation, forcing an ideology on people that is considered to be wrong and exploiting their feeling of weakness. That is the danger we face here. Many noble Lords will object, of course—and they will be right—that conversion therapists are quacks whereas doctors are real doctors. In my view, that makes it even more important that the doctors stick to their professional obligations and do not start advocating things they happen to believe are right. If we think about it that way, we will see just how important these amendments are.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to a couple of amendments that I have in this group. I start by responding to what the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham, has just said. I think that he misconceives his opponents—indeed, if I may say so, our opponents. They do not regard the offer of assisted suicide as an ideological act but simply as the offer of a different medical treatment, and this is one of the great divides between us. There are those of us who will not accept that offering to kill somebody or assist them in killing themselves can constitute a medical treatment. I say that purely as a preliminary and without relevance to what I am coming to, which is Amendment 166, which I shall speak to briefly.

This is a minor and technical amendment. It arises from the fact that the Bill, because it has this elaborate bureaucratic process, creates lots of decision points; if you made a decision map, it would be very complicated as you passed down through it. There is one here in Clause 5 that needs correcting or improving. It says in subsection (3):

“Where a person in England or Wales indicates to a registered medical practitioner their wish to seek assistance to end their own life in accordance with this Act, the registered medical practitioner may (but is not required to) conduct a preliminary discussion”.


Now a “preliminary discussion” is a technical term in the Bill. It is a key that opens up the path to assisted suicide—it is not just any old discussion that happens to come early, but a technical term. The registered medical practitioner may at that point have the preliminary discussion, but they do not have to; but subsection (6) makes clear what they do have to do, which is to refer somebody to a place where they can get information about how they can have a preliminary discussion.

My point is that the person making the inquiry about assisted suicide does not actually have to be ill. They might be asking—and quite wrongly asking—about ending their life, without coming within the scope of the Bill at all. I suggest that to avoid the poor doctor being driven off on these two impossible and irrelevant courses, we add to subsection (3), after the words “in England or Wales”,

“who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness”.

I should have thought that the noble and learned Lord would be willing to add that in the interests of clarity, to try to straighten out some of the complexities that the Bill, through its complications, has created.

Amendment 152 would do something that many other amendments in this group seek to do: it would prohibit a doctor or another health professional from initiating a discussion about assisted suicide. So many speeches have been made already about why this is a valuable thing to do that I am not going to attempt to repeat them. Indeed, even the story about my late father that I was going to tell noble Lords has been trumped by the very moving stories from my noble friend Lord Evans of Rainow about his mother and grandmother. Everything that I wanted to say has been said.