Wera Hobhouse
Main Page: Wera Hobhouse (Liberal Democrat - Bath)Department Debates - View all Wera Hobhouse's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
I want to thank the tireless campaigners, especially Pauline Carroll from our local Bath branch of Dignity in Dying, who has taken me on a journey over the past five years. Due to her courageous campaigning—she never let go—I gradually changed my mind over this difficult and complex issue, and Pauline is in the Public Gallery today.
The Government have amended the Health and Care Act 2022 so as to fully fund palliative and hospice services in the future. That is very welcome, but it is not enough. Our current law needs to change. One approach should not exclude the other. It is disappointing that no time was given to debate Baroness Meacher’s Bill and that Conservative peers were whipped on 16 March to vote against Lord Forsyth’s proposed assisted dying amendment to the Health and Care Act. It is time to apply honesty and justice to the debate. Constituents of mine have campaigned for years for a safeguarded assisting dying law for mentally competent, terminally ill adults with a six-month prognosis. I do not accept that this is the thin end of a wedge.
Whatever might otherwise be heard, it is a fact that palliative medicine and care has its limitations, even at its most excellent. Figures from the Office of Health Economics in 2019 show that every year, 6,400 terminally ill patients in hospices have horrendous deaths. One of my constituents wrote to me:
“I watched my mother being tortured to death with care, she was in extreme pain and was given the maximum level of pain relief. This only works for a time and between doses she was in agony.”
Those who suggest that palliative care can manage pain are ignoring what happens. In too many cases, pain cannot be alleviated. We should not hide that truth.
It was disappointing to learn in 2021, in a piece of research on end-of-life preferences by my local hospice, that assisted dying was not to be included. The reason given was that it is not legal. We cannot leave out the most pressing topic for end-of-life preference. Some people wish for assisted dying. Discounting it as a patient’s preference from the start is ideologically blinded and suggests that blanket opposition to assisted dying is supported by the hospice movement, for which I otherwise have the greatest respect.
In a BMA survey, 4,500 doctors voted in support of assisted dying legislation, whereby they could assist patients who can voluntarily take life-ending prescriptions under very clear and defined legislation. Recent evidence from a Royal College of General Practitioners survey shows that opposition to such legislation has fallen from 77% to 46%. Here in Parliament, we are falling very far behind public and medical opinion. We continue to force people to suffer a protracted death against their wishes, to spend £10,000 to go to Dignitas at a rate of one a week, or to add to the horrific new suicide statistics from the ONS.
Some terminally ill people will not choose palliative care but will opt for the choice of a safeguarded, doctor-assisted death, and that should be their right. I have gone on a journey to believing truly that prolonging an agonising life is not what I should stand for, and I speak as a Christian. Instead, we should allow for a compassionate death when that is what the dying person wishes for.