Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Friday 27th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I accept the spirit of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, so I shall be very brief. I support the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie, in her amendment on the register. I understand that one of the things that we are trying to do in this group is to protect professionals. Therefore, many of us will be very sympathetic to what the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, said about receiving hate mail if there were a register. However, in modern times, I am afraid that everyone in a public position has to face the disagreeable fact of hate mail; it is a feature of social media. We therefore cannot close down the openness that we want to have on many aspects.

I am thinking about the benefit of this register to the patient. It is important for the medical profession as well, but it is very important for the patient for a wider reason. First, obviously you want to find someone who will assist you to take your own life, but also, as these debates so often show, there is unfortunately a big moral gulf between those who support and those who oppose the Bill. If you think of a patient, particularly an elderly patient with a serious illness who is therefore eligible under the Bill, it is important that they know the type of doctor they are dealing with in a wider field of care.

For example, suppose I had to find a doctor for my aged mother, who is absolutely determined to live to be 100, and is, in fact, the only woman I know who lies upwards about her age. I know that she would not want to go to a doctor who provided assisted dying, which is understandable. Behind all this is a very different view about life and death and what they are, and a patient would therefore need to know. That is a very good reason for supporting the noble Baroness’s amendment.

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

I will be equivalently concise. It is important to connect Amendment 657, which specifies that assisted dying

“is not to be regarded as medical treatment”,

with our debate on the broader conscience protections that the Bill needs to include. The reason is not just that regarding assisted dying as a treatment is a conceptual error. As Wittgenstein pointed out:

“Death is not an event in life”.


We are talking about a personal existential choice. It is in no sense a treatment, but the Bill is silent on that question. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and others have pointed out, that matters in the real world because, notwithstanding the employment protections included in the Bill, the professional duties on a doctor are potentially in play if assisted dying is determined to be a treatment. That will give rise to questions on the obligations of a doctor to raise assisted dying as a possibility, even if that doctor’s conscience is against participating. It will give rise to consent questions—we talked previously about the McCulloch test—and negligence questions from surviving members of the family. It is therefore important that we put this beyond doubt.

Given the understandable desire of the House to move on to the next group, I will just commend to fellow noble Lords an article in the BMJ from 9 June last year, written by Professors Gareth Owen, Alex Ruck Keene and Katherine Sleeman, which sets this all out beautifully. Their conclusion was:

“Statutory ambiguity serves neither professionals providing assisted dying, nor patients requesting it. Parliamentarians must consider this question”.


That is what we are doing. Amendment 657 would put it beyond doubt, and I hope that the noble and learned Lord the sponsor will accept it.