Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I am humbled to follow the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, and to have heard what he had to say about his terrible lifetime of illness.

I recognise the efforts that my noble friend Lady Meacher has taken to ensure safeguards for patients who want assisted dying, but I cannot support this Bill. I have spoken to doctors in Oregon, the Netherlands and Belgium, in countries which already have assisted dying and euthanasia laws. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, that it is relevant to look at these countries because they presage a change of culture. All of these laws started out with assisted death as a rare event, for those patients who were enduring unbearable suffering and wanted to die, but your Lordships’ House has only to look at how these laws have changed and evolved in the intervening years to understand that what starts with the best intentions can be gradually and importantly eroded. Despite my noble friend Lady Meacher’s assurance, I fear that the Bill starts this country along the path towards assisted death becoming normalised.

I am particularly concerned about what happens to those in old age. In Oregon, the law was originally to assist patients with diagnoses of terminal illness with six months to live. However, last year the Oregon data report showed that some patients were granted assistance with dying because they were suffering from incurable but not terminal conditions that are prevalent in old age, such as arthritis or complications from a fall.

I am shocked by what, as many other noble Lords have mentioned, is happening across the channel in the Netherlands and Belgium. I know that their starting places were different from this Bill. Both countries have euthanasia laws and, originally, they too were to be used in rare instances but now, in some instances, it has become normalised, seen by many as the path to a good death. In the Netherlands, the Supreme Court has ruled that patients with dementia who, before they could

“no longer express their will” ,

left a written statement requesting euthanasia, can now have it carried out—once a doctor judges that the patient’s condition is one of unbearable suffering. In Belgium, it was ruled that the writer Hugo Claus was so perturbed by the diagnosis of dementia he faced and the unbearable suffering it gave him that he was allowed to have euthanasia, even before any symptoms were apparent.

My fear is that these assisted pathways to death put huge pressure on patients and medical staff alike, for them not to be a burden on either the health system or their own family. I know first-hand the desire for old people not to want to be a burden. A close relation of mine was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 15 years ago. Her wish at the time was that, if possible, she should be given assisted death before she lost her memory because she did not want to a burden on her family. Fortunately, we do not have a law that permits this, and I hope that we never will. She now has very limited memory and suffers bouts of great confusion, but she is physically able. Despite her condition, she is able to enjoy huge pleasure in the moment, being with her grandchildren, gardening or going on walks. I know that dementia is excluded from the Bill, but I do not want this country to start down a path where assisted dying becomes normal and deprives many people of potential enjoyment and contribution to life, which they had never anticipated when their diagnoses were first given.