Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, sadness and sympathy are palpable in our inboxes and in this Chamber. Your Lordships’ House is a sobering scene. I begin with what is missing from the Bill—the letter “S”, the plural. As the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, has outlined, there is no mention of family or relatives. Its premise is the western Enlightenment view of the self and individual autonomy, which is alien to parts of the UK, let alone to some of our ethnic minority communities. On the latter, I can put it no better than an article by Chine McDonald, director of Theos, in a post on 26 November last year:

“Many people will be familiar with the southern African term ‘Ubuntu’, which means ‘I am because you are’. In my own community—the Igbo ethnic group of south-eastern Nigeria—there is the concept of the Umunna: the fraternity, the clan or the community … there is a strong sense of existing not as an individual, but knitted into a family … The idea that someone who is facing death might not want to be a burden … is anathema to West African tradition. You can’t be a burden because you are not a separate entity. You’re part of a whole”.


Anyone who has visited the north-east of England might attest to a similar “thick” community.

I heard the compelling story of someone with PTSD after watching the huge syringes of drugs go into their father. There is no duty under the Bill to warn them. What about the effect on you of witnessing the failed process that the Bill outlines? Or are they just not allowed to be there?

Another “S” is “subtle”. Many noble Lords have spoken of subtle pressure, and pressure and coercion are used in the Bill, by relatives, which can be hard to detect. There is another wrong premise in the Bill: that pressure comes from a person. If you join a Facebook networking group, say, for fellow sufferers of the same disease, the algorithms can alter the content offered to you, or comments by others can cause you to idealise the thought of assisted dying, create a reward pathway in your brain and even, according to studies, change the network and structure of your brain. Thus, in fact, the coercion could come from an unquantifiable force, or even an algorithm, not a person. How can medical practitioners ever know if you have been pressurised like this? Although this research field is still in its infancy, could we, in 10 years, be reporting that deaths were actually through coercion on social networking? Even today, a family is suing OpenAI, saying that ChatGPT encouraged their son to take his life. Other studies are now reporting that people are more likely to turn to social media for medical health reports than to qualified physicians. This is the world in which we are legislating. We know that this can influence elections; how can it not influence these decisions?

The clause to prohibit advertising is insufficient. This Bill is for an analogue age, not one on the cusp of AI. Although I support the suggestion of the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, for a Select Committee—and I hope I am not throwing a spanner into the timetable—I do not think we can ignore these issues. I am an optimist, and I hope that the six-month timeline in the Bill—again, because we are on the cusp of medical breakthroughs—will in the future become impossible. Anyone who knows parents of children with cystic fibrosis knows that the new-gen drugs are transformative. How will clinicians advise when they do not know what breakthroughs we are on the cusp of?

My final “S” is single women, as the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, talked about. A meta-analysis of the best quality of Oregon between 1998 and 2018 says that it witnessed an increase of 50% in voluntary suicide of older women over the age of 65. We know that suicide can be contagious. Are we opening up that Pandora’s box again? I agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London about voting on the principle. This is leadership from the Church of England, and the feedback to me is very welcome. I do not view this as taking your own life; I view it as giving your life back to God. This is a sacred act, and not one the state should provide.