Anyone heard of this lot? Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, Baroness Grey-Thompson, Lord Carlile of Berriew, Baroness Coffey, Lord Goodman of Wycombe, Lord Moylan, and Lord Sandhurst. I’ve heard of two of them, Baroness Grey-Thompson who used to be an athlete and Baroness Coffey, a cigar-smoking former Tory minister. The rest? No clue. But they have one thing in common: they’re in the House Of Lords and they are trying to block the Terminally Ill Adults Bill, which would make assisted dying legal. In order to delay and even defeat the bill, they have put forward 587 amendments between them out of the 800-odd that have been submitted. They are wreckers. Worse than that, they are unelected wreckers.
I don’t want to go over the old arguments for and against the bill. That’s been done, literally I suppose, to death. The House Of Commons supports the bill and the principles and now we are in the Committee stages. Amendments, you might think, would be constructive ones, in order to improve legislation, but not from this lot of unelected toadies. The don’t want to change the bill: they want to block it.
Read this from Humanists UK’s website: “Baroness Coffey has put forward an amendment that says that a person can only have an assisted death if they have not left the UK in the past twelve months. This would prevent anyone who had recently been on holiday from having an assisted death, and would also be unenforceable.” And this: “Lord Goodman of Wycombe has put forward several amendments to increase the number of assessment stages from two independent doctors and a panel to five doctors and a panel, the fifth being a geriatrician. This would be impossible to navigate for a terminally ill person with fewer than six months to live, and a significant minority of applicants for an assisted death would be under the age of 60.” This is cynicism in stilts. They really should back away and mind their own business. And minding their own business is what the whole bill is about: people being able to choose to die if things are getting too much.
How can it be anyone else’s business to prevent someone else from choosing to end their own life, for whatever reason? I always use the same argument with matters of individual conscience. You don’t agree with abortion? Then don’t have one. You don’t agree with gay/equal marriage? Then don’t marry a gay person. And in this case, you don’t agree with assisted dying? Then don’t be assisted to die. This is not difficult, is it?
I am not interested in anyone’s arguments against assisted dying. The only person who matters is the person who wishes to be assisted to die. Read the words of Louise Shackleton who spoke movingly about her experience of accompanying her husband to Dignitas and then being subject to a 10 month investigation by the police which could have seen her sent to prison for up to 14 years if she was prosecuted and then found guilty of a criminal offence:
“I sat by my husband’s side as he made as he made the most heartbreaking and dignified decision of his life. He was suffering, and the only mercy left was to travel to Switzerland to end that suffering. For loving him enough to go with him, I was treated like a criminal. The system failed him, and it failed me. No one should have to choose between compassion and the law. We need change, not more delays, not more political games, but real, humane change.”
If someone I loved wanted to end their own life to end their misery, would I feel any differently? I honestly don’t think I would. But I would want that person – and me, too – to have the freedom to end that life. And I certainly would not expect someone I didn’t know and frankly wouldn’t want to know to prevent it happening.
