Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I draw attention to what I said in two of our previous debates on assisted dying, at col. 1215 on 12 May 2006 and col. 895 on 18 July 2014. As to this debate, I thank the very many people who have sent me handwritten personal letters in support of the Bill. They make for heart-rending reading, each with a different personal story of great suffering which would have been—and would be—rendered unnecessary by the Bill. I have been less impressed by the many emails I have received via the Right To Life organisation, which used largely standardised wording. But, of course, I thank them too.

Staying with personal experience, as I mentioned more fully in my two previous speeches, I am one of the thousands of people who have had what is so often referred to as a near-death experience. In 1977, I was having a two-hour operation when the anaesthetic gradually failed, but the paralysing drug, curare, continued to work most effectively, so I was unable to lift even a finger or blink an eyelid, let alone scream at the advancing pain. “Oh my God,” I said to myself, “no one is going to believe this”—and the most wonderful voice replied, “But they don’t believe in God either, do they?” I was then led away from the pain into the indescribable opposite of pain: light, compassion, strength, beauty, goodness and so much more. I was also told that all this, the eternal force of good, was losing to its opposite, the eternal force of evil, because we were not doing enough to fight evil. “If we do not fight for Him, God will lose,” was the message I brought back.

I mention this experience again because the agnostic scientific community’s response to this sort of experience is that great pain can cause the release of endorphins in the brain, so it is hallucinatory. I would refer them to a recent book, Proof of Heaven, written by perhaps the top brain specialist in America, Dr Eben Alexander, who was in a coma for a week and whose medical knowledge convinces him that his experience of heaven was real, not hallucinatory.

This leads me to suggest that many of those who oppose the Bill may have an exaggerated fear of death. I accept that the Bill may lead to a very few people choosing to die unnecessarily, but I submit that their numbers will be far outweighed by the many more who—of their own volition—will be relieved of their earthly suffering and will move on to somewhere infinitely better and more wonderful.