Assisted Dying

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Danny Kruger]

I recognise the force of that point, but the fact is that Parliament has debated the topic repeatedly over the last 20 years. We have devoted considerable hours of parliamentary time to it already.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

We had the opportunity to vote on the matter in 2015, but that was a great many years ago and many people who are Members of Parliament today were not present. Does my hon. Friend agree that “repeatedly” was perhaps the wrong word to use in that context?

[Danny Kruger]

As I understand it, we have had 14 hours of parliamentary time devoted to the topic in this Parliament alone. I suggest that there are other topics that we could address. I recognise that assisted dying is worth discussing, but there is something that we should do first, before we consider it. I will come to that point in a moment.

Members who think we can prevent people from being put on the pathway to assisted dying by good drafting, or because doctors are good people—obviously, they are—should think about the “do not resuscitate” scandal we had during the pandemic, and about the Liverpool care pathway, and then suggest there is no risk. I think there is a risk. I know that doctors are good people who want the best, but if we force them to make utilitarian decisions about the best use of resources, will they not push people in this direction?

As well as the pressure on the healthcare system to take this route, I worry even more about the pressure on patients themselves to request assisted dying if it is an option. It will be an option for almost everybody approaching death—that is the proposal. Clinical guidelines for many terminal or chronic illnesses will likely require doctors, at an early stage of planning treatment, to ask patients whether they would wish to have assistance in taking their own life. What a question to ask. Whatever the guidelines, every family will be required to have the conversation, in whispers or openly. In some families, we know how that conversation could all too likely go.

Over half the people in countries where assisted dying is legal choose it because they feel they are a burden to their family. Tragically, a lot also say that they are lonely. Is that not terrible—people getting the state to help kill them because they do not want to be a burden on a family that never visits them? Talk to any hospice manager about relatives and they will quietly confirm it. There are a lot of people who want granny or grandpa to hurry up and die.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. I am pleased that we have the opportunity to debate the issue of assisted dying, and I am grateful to every single one of the people who signed the petition—it is a healthy part of our democracy. We need to recognise that public feeling on this issue is strong, and people want us in Parliament to consider it. It would be wrong to shut down debate or pack it up as too difficult. We cannot ignore this issue, and we cannot simply look away.

When terminally ill people have taken their cases before the courts, as in the case of Shropshire resident Noel Conway, the courts have repeatedly affirmed that assisted dying is a matter for Parliament. We cannot shirk that responsibility. As we have heard today, assisted dying is happening, whether that is the DPP exercising discretion after the event, a compassionate doctor giving a little more morphine than he perhaps should, or people travelling to Dignitas. It is time for reform, and for legal clarity on this vital issue.

As a member of the Health Committee, I very much hope that we have the opportunity to hold an inquiry into the issue of assisted dying. There must, in any event, be a full inquiry, and I beg the Minister to listen to that plea and for legislative time to be made available, because our role as legislators is to find a solution to this—to allow the terminally ill the right to determine the manner of their own death, as well as providing the necessary safeguards for the vulnerable and, as many people have said, improving palliative care for all those at the end of life. It is not for Parliament to deny someone at the end of life the option of a peaceful death. As parliamentarians, we all want to improve the lives of our constituents, and as we have heard today, the prospect of a good and peaceful death is something that improves the lives of those facing a terminal illness. The debate needs to be about giving people that option, even if most terminally ill people never take it up. That peace of mind helps them to face death.

I deeply respect the religious views of others on all subjects, and it is their right to express their views and live them out. However, in a liberal democracy, the religious views of some do not restrict the rights and freedom of others, and so it is with this issue. When we debated assisted dying in Parliament in 2015, it was done with great respect for differing views, and it has been disappointing to see that polarisation is creeping into this debate. Instead of debating the arguments, we have seen attacks on campaign groups and a determination to conflate the tragedy of suicide with the right of the terminally ill to decide the manner of their death. We must choose our words with care and have the humility to understand that those who disagree with us are not motivated by malign intent, or are somehow less virtuous.

I want to end with the voice of my constituent Sarah. She said:

“My beloved husband Steve was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2011. What a day that was. It was like a tsunami had hit us. Steve was so brave—a true warrior—but MND is not a fight that can be won. To watch the man I loved, the father to my three children, lose every single scrap of dignity for so long was completely heartbreaking. In truth I was never ready to say goodbye to him, but watching him suffer in that way was so cruel. Steve deserved the right to choose, the right to say when enough is enough.”

Who are we to deny Steve and others like him that freedom and that choice?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Those who favour assisted dying will get their wish: there will be a debate on the Floor of the House of Commons, and if there is one more debate, there will be others. They will go on through the years, and the majorities against assisted dying will get smaller and smaller, because of course we are up against it. Overwhelmingly, the economics are against us—[Interruption.] It is about economics. We have a vast, ever-growing population of people who are very frail and very elderly, who are a burden on society and know it. Therefore, I predict that, sooner or later, the House of Commons will debate this issue and, sadly, pass a law as so many other countries have done.

This is not a debate about assisted dying. We all want to help people to die peacefully and painlessly. It is a debate about assisted suicide—helping people to kill themselves.

[Lucy Allan]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

I would rather the right hon. Gentleman did not, actually.

[Lucy Allan]

My right hon. Friend says that this debate is about suicide, but I wonder whether he has a family member, as I have, who took their own life through suicide, and whether he understands the difference between that and what we are talking about today?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I have not had a family member do that, but we have all encountered friends and relatives who have been under intolerable pressure. Hon. Members have cited examples, and I can do so too.

I simply take a very pro-life point of view. It is not from my religious conviction or my belief that everybody is beautiful and wonderful, however small, however tiny in the womb, however old or frail, how much of a burden they are, whether they are a convicted murder or whether they are one of our military enemies. I take a pro-life view, and I think so much of the misery in the world in the last 100 years has been because people are casual about taking life. Many of the arguments that we hear in favour of assisted dying are based on very appalling, horrible and extreme cases. They are similar arguments to what we heard when we had the initial debates on abortion, with foetal abnormality, rape and all the other things. Then we had abortion on demand, and now we are going to get death on demand. That is what it is all about. All the pressure, particularly on the frail and vulnerable, will be about that.

I want to make a theological point. A friend of mine died in the first months of covid. He died in agony. He died in a part of the country where he was sent out of hospital because the medical profession was panicking. He was not given adequate palliative care and he died in agony. It was appalling. We are all agreed that we are still not doing enough about palliative care. We have to do much more. We have to tell everybody that they have the right to go into a hospice—a right that so many people are not given—and receive the full benefit of modern medical technology to die peacefully and painlessly. For the overwhelming majority of people, if they are given palliative care, it is an option they can enjoy.

I actually watched another friend of mine die. He was my best friend and former colleague in this House. He was dying of terminal cancer; I was sitting beside him and I could see the morphine pumping through his wrists. He died peacefully and painlessly, but I have no doubt that it was the morphine that killed him. Theologically, morally and legally, there is nothing against a doctor helping me to die by pumping morphine into me, even if that is the immediate cause of my death. [Interruption.] I can see people shaking their heads, but I have actually seen it happen. Is there anyone in this room who would blame a doctor who helped someone to die if they were in agony? The doctor was not trying to kill them—they were trying to ease the pain. And in easing the pain by delivering that amount of morphine, that might have hastened their demise.

Let us be realistic about it. Let us try to take a pro-life view, and let us remember—