Debate on Assisted Dying Legislation

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Um, the last time that this House considered this bill at

second reading,

I was keeping a secret.

Whilst honorable and right honorable members were debating the issue, I was

grappling with my own terminal diagnosis.

I was told I have stage four incurable metastatic breast

cancer.

I was overwhelmed with grief, fear, and

anxiety. I was scared of what was to come, and I was

fearful of how it would impact my family and my loved ones.

I was scared that I was gonna get really poorly and thinking,

"How will I cope?

How will my family cope? How will I be cared for?

How will I afford it? How badly will it hurt?

How long will it last?"

When you hear those words, depression, anxiety,

grief, fear, shame, and guilt

come in bounds.

Suicide risk is highest immediately after

diagnosis, and it usually falls quickly within three

to six

months.

I would be lying if I said that when thinking about all that

was to come, I didn't consider that it might just be fairer

and easier on everyone if I just got the dying over with as soon

as

possible.

Having treatable depression, however, will not exclude anyone from an

assisted death within this bill, and depression is common

among people with terminal illness, but it is often treatable.

Clinicians are trained to prevent suicide in people suffering from depression,

but where would the line be drawn? This bill makes no provision to

support this difficult transition or to create safeguards around it.

A person can also be suicidal and have unmet mental health

needs prior to developing a terminal illness and then

ask the state to kill them without any assessment of their

psychological health, just their mental capacity, because

mental capacity and mental health are not the same

thing.

Hear, hear.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists recommends a holistic

multidisciplinary assessment of every applicant.

The three-person panel at the end of the assessment process in this bill is not

what most NHS clinicians recognize as a multidisciplinary team.

It certainly does not allow for meaningful multidisciplinary

decision-making. The assessment needs to happen at the

beginning of the process,

not the end, and each team member should be

independently assessing

the patient in person. This is not what has been

included in this bill.

Now,

I don't know how long I will live.

I will be on treatment for life, however long or

short that may be. I at the moment live between

scans in nine to 12-week blocks of time.

The last scan may show the disease is stable, but the next scan might show

that it is growing again. If the disease is stable, the drug's

working, and we can carry on.

Eventually, the drug will stop working, the cancer will grow,

and we'll have to try

another drug and see if that works.

At some point, we'll either run out of drugs to try

or I'll be too

poorly to tolerate them. Then I die.

It could be months. It could be years.

No one really knows. Prognosis is

notoriously difficult to predict.

Palliative care professionals and oncologists tell me that whilst they

can more or less give me an indication of when I'll die when I'm a few days

or weeks off, anything beyond that is the flip of a coin.

The six-month prognosis in this bill is something no one can ever be really

sure

of.

But what the palliative care professionals have told me is that

palliative care can help me when I die.

But in the campaign around this bill, it seems to me that it's being

implied that without, um, uh, that a person with a terminal

illness will have a dreadful, painful death unless they have

access to assisted dying, and it's simply not true.

Palliative care in the UK is excellent.

Far too many people do not have access to palliative care that they need.

Hear, hear.

But the idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and

discomfort is false.

People,

I, have been terrorized with tales of people

vomiting up their own feces as though this is commonplace during

death. It is vanishingly

rare. And, you know, bowel obstructions

are more common, but they are treatable. I know.

I've had one.

It's nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like

me into believing our deaths will be horrific when all the

evidence suggests that with access to good palliative care,

deaths are, on the

whole, gentle. The answer is not to terrify people and their

families. It's to sort out palliative care

and social-

Hear, hear

... care first, because none of this takes place in a

vacuum.

Until we can say that everyone that needs it has access to high-quality

palliative care, then we're offering nobody a choice.

Hear, hear.

A terrible death or an assisted death is not a choice.

Hear, hear.

It's a threat.

Yeah.

Whilst I speak today from the position of someone with a terminal

illness, I'm acutely aware that this is not about

me.

This debate is also not about an abstract concept or a

position of principle.

The question that will be put at the end of this debate will not

be that this House has considered the question of assisted dying.

It won't even be that this House agrees with the principle

of assisted

dying. The question will be that this House agrees that this

bill be read for a second time. This bill,

not the bill it might have been, not the bill members might have hoped it

would be,

not the bill it could be. This bill.

It is the only thing before us today.

And incidentally, it says absolutely

nothing about the House of Lords. That is

not the question that we are being asked.

Hear, hear.