Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Farmer and Lord Falconer of Thoroton

Committee stage
Friday 30th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is quite right that autonomy is the basic principle under this Bill. In fact, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, told the Select Committee that the essence of the Bill before us is autonomy, which makes it an outlier. Terminal illness plus an autonomous decision should not be the model that allows this Bill to be engaged. That terminal illness must also be causing suffering, which is why I support my noble friend Lord Frost’s Amendment 84. Rather than this being a cruel and heartless precondition, there are many public policy reasons for this that others have mentioned.

First, it would prevent social and economic circumstances and fear of being a burden from driving applications for assisted suicide. Secondly, if suffering were included, doctors could properly discuss palliative care and pain management, and lack of care could never be the motivation. Finally, there is a democratic imperative. The publicly presented raison d’être for this Bill is always the relief of suffering. Yet, without a suffering requirement, assisted suicide can be for any reason if there is a terminal illness judged to lead to death within six months. Others, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, have said why this six-month rule is unsafe and unworkable. We are glad Esther Rantzen is still with us three years after she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. We all sympathise greatly and genuinely with the loss of control she is facing; none of us looks forward to that. Like Dame Esther, I am also in my ninth decade. It is not at all theoretical that I, or indeed anybody else in this Chamber, might be in a similar position fairly soon.

None of us can be casual or flippant about the loss of autonomy. However, neither can we be reckless about this further move into what is in fact extreme bodily autonomy. I am particularly taken by the treatment of autonomy by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, assured the nation on the “Today” programme yesterday that he respects people of faith. Throughout Morality, the last book Sacks published while alive, he stressed that human dignity does not come from autonomy alone but from being in relationship with others and—dare I say it—with God. The thread running through it is that we are moral beings because we are not alone. Autonomy is, he said, a “significant moral principle”, but there are other values, equally significant, that limit autonomy. When it comes to life and death, society must decide whether life is something we own or something over which we are stewards. For Sacks, redefining life as private property is inherently dangerous. If life becomes seen as disposable at will, society risks weakening its shared responsibility to protect and care for the vulnerable. When autonomy is allowed to trump all other values, the moral fabric of care and duty begins to unravel.

Allowing assisted suicide to enable unfettered choice shifts dignity away from intrinsic worth towards functionality or self-sufficiency, which is a dangerous precedent. Once the boundary between caring for life and ending life is blurred, society risks losing reverence for the vulnerable. Sacks treats the enthroning of personal autonomy as symptomatic of our cultural shift away from shared moral responsibility—a “we” orientation—to hyper-individualism, the fixation on “me”, which you could also say is selfishness. Assisted suicide further skews this imbalance by treating life purely as an individual possession rather than a shared trust.

It is not surprising that Bill’s sponsors have gone down the same autonomy rather than suffering route as the US has done, because international metrics bracket us with the US in terms of how individualistic we are as a nation. Yet Australia has an even higher individualism score than the UK. States and territories within it, and other high-scoring countries such as Netherlands, Canada and New Zealand, have all resisted the siren song of extreme bodily autonomy in this area and so should we.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

This is a pretty high-quality speech; it has pretty little to do with the six months. It is about the whole principle of the Bill. I am just wondering whether it is going to connect back to the six months.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

I am supporting the inclusion of suffering from the noble Lord, Lord Frost, which is increasing the choice from autonomy to increased suffering. That is how it joins here. As many noble Lords have said, it is a very important area for us to discuss, and it is the underlying principle that the noble and learned Lord has said is supporting this Bill.

I mentioned shrouded attributes at Second Reading: the long-term unintended consequences of a course of action that might be politically attractive in the short term. Others have warned of the inevitable widening of the Bill through judicial review and future legislation, but I want to point out where else extreme bodily autonomy might take us. It is currently illegal to sell body materials—no money can change hands, apart from fixed compensation for expenses incurred for donating, for example, eggs, sperm or live organs such as kidneys. All that people can get for donating blood and plasma is light refreshments. Asserting autonomy and ownership over body parts would mean that people could sell one of their kidneys, perhaps to get out of debt. Do we really want that?

People with the rare condition body integrity dysphoria—BID—feel that a specific, healthy part of their body does not belong to them and that their body might feel right if it were removed or disabled. Until this happens—and, sadly, sometimes after amputation—they experience intense persistent distress, which usually starts in childhood or early adolescence and is lifelong. Again, do we really want what is illegal for doctors to perform now in this area to become legal and socially acceptable?

It is our duty and role in the UK legislative system to bottom out these shrouded attributes and long-term culture-shifting consequences. Bodily autonomy can never be treated as an absolute right. It must always be balanced against our status as moral social beings. Its primacy in the Bill is not a virtue but a fatal flaw.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Farmer and Lord Falconer of Thoroton

Committee stage
Friday 12th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

I thank the noble and learned Lord for giving way. I will comment on the other side of the argument, which is the moral hazard. This could be an extreme case, but I will give the example of somebody who has lung cancer and has within a year to live. They also have some very difficult relationships and have wanted to get rid of a certain person for a long time. If they get rid of them, they will be sent to prison but will be within having six months to live and can have an assisted death, which takes away from the victim, the victim’s family and others any concern that justice is done. By giving them an assisted suicide, justice would not be done in that case.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

I am not quite sure I understand the point. If the position is that I have six months to live and I want to kill somebody, which appears to be the example given, I am entitled to an assisted death whether I am in prison or not. It would probably take six months before the trial took place anyway. I am not quite sure what is the moral hazard that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has in mind, because the right to an assisted death would be there inside or outside of prison. So, I do not see what benefit would be obtained by excluding it from somebody in prison.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

If I may try and answer that, the moral hazard is that the victim would have seen a criminal convicted, but the criminal would not serve the sentence given to them by the courts and would instead have an easy way out. You could say that he has six months to live, but as we know, in many cases —Esther Rantzen, for instance, is one of them—it can go on for years. To end his punishment would not give justice to the victim—that is the point I am making.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

It is just such an obscure proposition that we should not determine our policy in relation to it.

Moving on to pregnant women, the amendments say that no pregnant woman should have the right to an assisted death and that everybody who wants an assisted death must have a pregnancy test. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, made it clear that the second was a probing amendment and not a serious proposition. In relation to pregnant women, I completely accept what is being said, particularly by my noble friend Lady Berger, about what the statistics show. Again, safeguards can adequately deal with this and I am not in favour of any change in relation to it. We should remember that what we are dealing with here is somebody who has only six months to live. Homeless people—