Meeting of the Parliament 12 March 2026 [Draft]
This is only the second time that I have spoken in the debate, and I have lodged no stage 3 amendments, which is unusual for me.
This part of the bill troubles me more than most parts of it do. When is it appropriate to raise the issue of assisted dying? I do not support the bill, but, if it passes, we must ensure that the issue is raised at the right moment.
Let me be clear. I know that, when you get an adverse diagnosis, you are at your lowest ebb. Invariably, you have not listened to what you have been told, so you are reliant on members of your family to have listened with you. You do not have access to doctors and nurses afterwards. It might take you three or four weeks to get used to the diagnosis and to understand what it means. At that stage, you look for treatment options, and it is those treatment options that give you the confidence to go forward. Therefore, that is not the time—it never will be the time—to raise the issue of assisted dying.
The question is how we can legislate for that. Every time you go into hospital—I have been in a few recently—you are told about all the risks that you will face. You are told, “You could get a blood clot,” “You could get this,” or, “You could get that.” You are given options. I did not want, at that stage, to be given assisted dying as one of my options. Actually, it would not have been relevant to me, but if it had been relevant, I would not have wanted to have been given that option.
I think back to my mother, who died with breast cancer. It took six months for her to die. She did not want to approach death. She wanted to live. She would not have wanted a doctor to have raised with her the option of assisted dying at any stage during those six months. However, on her final day, when she knew that she was not going to go any further, she asked the doctor what the prognosis was. It was right that the doctor told her, and it would have been right, if the bill had been passed, for the doctor to have given her options. However, that is such a difficult thing to do.
I do not envy members making this decision, but we should be very careful to ensure that, when we decide when the right time is for a doctor to tell a patient about their options, it is the right time for the patient, not the right time for the bill, for the doctor or for anyone else. We cannot remove hope from the patient when we do that.