Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, like many noble Lords in this House, I have wrestled with this Bill for weeks on end and have changed my mind several times. My father died at the age of 97, a proud and honourable man, a veteran of the French navy and a devout Catholic. He spent his last days almost blind, incontinent, in pain and confined to a hospital bed. When I visited him with my late husband and sons, he looked at us with love, but could barely speak. He whispered only two words, “Quel supplice”—what torture. That night, after saying goodbye, he tried to end his own life by pulling out his drips. Alarms sounded and the nurses bound his hands so he could not try again. The next day I was horrified to find my father reduced in this way. That experience left me sympathetic to the right to die.

On a personal level, I would want that choice. I do not want my sons’ last memory of their mother to be like the one I have of my father, but personal experiences, however powerful, are not enough to justify enacting a law of such gravity. The risks are stark: coercion, irreversible errors, erosion of trust between doctors and patients, pressure on the elderly and the infirm, financial costs and the burden on an already overstretched GP workforce. I could add to this the long list of concerns so clearly listed by many noble Lords who spoke before me. Some argue that we are behind other countries, but so what? Canada gives me pause. Eight years on, assisted dying has become routine and is now the fifth leading cause of death. Reports show that people are seeking euthanasia not because they are terminally ill, but because they are poor, isolated or unable to access proper care. A right to die has become a duty to die. Now in Canada, there is a question of expanding this law to include children.

At present, doctors feel compelled to keep people alive at all costs, because it is a crime to hasten death. This has caused some to suffer unnecessarily but, if the law changes, we must be equally vigilant that it does not push people in the opposite direction, towards feeling that death is expected of them. The advocates of the Bill cite many cases like my father’s. They are motivated by compassion, yet to enshrine in law the deliberate taking of life is a moral hurdle too high to cross, particularly when key details will be decided later, through regulation. In our law, a case must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Here, for me, that doubt remains, and it is too great to ignore.

I finish by telling the story of a 72 year-old Swiss woman who had put her name down with Dignitas. She never made it, because Covid happened, so she did not die. Soon, a neighbour moved in, she met him, liked him, they fell in love and they married.