Assisted Suicide

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

This is not an easy contribution for me to make, and I have thought long and hard about it. My father took his life last July and my emotions are still a bit raw. I was deeply shocked at the time, although I should not have been surprised, as he had always said that he would rather end it than face a distressing and lingering death. He was 87 and he had lived his life to the full, right to the end, but he had watched many of his friends go. He regularly talked about one who had been confined to bed, doubly incontinent and, having become both deaf and blind, unable to communicate with anybody. My father saw no point to that kind of life.

My father was a strong man who had had a tough east-end childhood. He was an RAF pilot in the second world war. He had his share of health problems and faced them all positively. He was not afraid of pain but he could not face the indignity of that lingering degrading death. I am sure that he made up his mind soon after receiving a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer but he still died prematurely. I am sure that what drove him to end his life when he did was the fear that if he did not act while he could he would lose the opportunity to act at all. If the law had made it possible, he could, and I am sure he would, have shared his plans. He would have been able to say goodbye and to die with his family around him and not alone in a carbon monoxide-filled garage. He and many more like him deserved better.

I was in two minds about whether to share this experience, and what made up my mind was the attitude of my father’s friends, who had clearly thought about their own future and had nothing but respect for his decision. One contacted me only yesterday and asked me to share his experience of his daughter’s death. She was a young woman with everything to look forward to who was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer in her mid-20s. She fought it in every way she could, with everything to look forward to and undergoing all the treatments available, but ultimately they all failed. He said that even when there was no hope left for her and the hospital had withdrawn her food, they had to watch her die the most horrendous, slow death over several weeks from graft-versus-host disease, a consequence of a failed bone marrow transplant. They were deeply scarred by that experience, and still when they think of her that memory overshadows all the happy times. They thought it would have been so much kinder to have brought her life to an end as she would have wanted at an earlier point when everybody recognised that all treatments had failed and there was no hope.

I welcome the DPP’s guidance but I think that ultimately we will need to go further. Of course there must be safeguards and constructing them robustly will be difficult, but the challenge of the task should not put us off the need to do it. This issue will not go away. As medical technology advances, more and more people will face these decisions and more will be pressing at the boundaries of the law. I think this is a question not of whether we should go further and legalise assisted dying but of when. The longer it takes us to act, the more needless suffering we will have consented to.