Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, one thing on which I think we can all agree is that everyone speaking today does so with a sense of deep compassion, but also of great responsibility. We have heard about heartrending individual cases which cannot but attract our most heartfelt sympathy, and which lead a number of your Lordships to believe that the Bill, or something like it, is required to relieve suffering. Like many noble Lords, I have personal experience of such cases and, were I in similar circumstances, I might well wish for an accelerated and assisted death, but our task in this Chamber is not just to seek remedies for individual cases, no matter how tragic, nor to take counsel only for the present. We have a responsibility to consider the potential implications of legislation for the whole of our society, both now and in the future.

On these grounds, there are many arguments to be made against the Bill, but in the limited time available, I shall add my voice in support of just one: the status of the medical profession in our society.

At the moment, there is a prohibition on doctors actively procuring or helping to procure the deaths of their patients. They need not, in all circumstances, fight to delay death, but they cannot intervene solely to promote it. This is a clear position, and it helps to fundamentally address the inevitable asymmetry in the relationship between doctors and their often emotionally exposed and vulnerable patients.

If that position is ceded, however, the ground on which the medical profession stands is rendered unstable: it goes from a position of clarity to one of unpredictability, particularly when the rules governing the assisting of suicide shift over time—as they surely will. Once clinicians become involved in taking life, people change their position for ever. They will no longer be health professionals but health and death professionals, so the Bill does not represent a small change. It involves a seismic shift in the arrangements and understandings that underpin a crucial part of our society. Its dangers are many and it safeguards are, in my view, largely illusory.

I entirely understand the noble motives of those who support the Bill, and I wish I could see a way in which their objectives could be achieved safely, but I cannot. I must therefore oppose the Bill.