Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Lawlor Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, this is a difficult and controversial Bill, not only because of the substantial amount of delegated legislation, the problem of skeleton legislation and the lack of adequate pre-legislative scrutiny, as committees of this House have pointed out and as the evidence presented by lawyers and academics, including at the think tank where I am research director, also points out; and not only because of the magnitude of the proposed change and the potential impact to which your Lordships have drawn attention—even though this has no electoral mandate, which would have allowed for pre-legislative consultation and debate nationally, which is not guaranteed by opinion polls. Most important of all, the Bill fails to recognise the nature of and basis for the law in the fundamental matter of life and death.

Once assisting suicide is allowed, it becomes impossible to detect cases where more than assistance is provided and someone is in effect induced to kill themselves. This is a criminal act, but under this Bill it becomes impossible to police. As the Chief Coroner has recently pointed out, the Bill removes any realistic prospect of an effective inquest. The Bill also ignores the moral and religious underpinning of a historic tradition based on the principle that the life of each person is sacred, irrespective of how much or how little value may be put on it by others, or the state, or whether that life has a cost to others. Without such a premise we risk a descent into barbarism, where human lives may be done away with as fast as battery chickens: by category, by age, by disability, or on account of mental and psychiatric condition. Indeed, the mask proposed by the dramatic change in the law in the Bill—the veneer of strict conditionality and the obligation for the person himself or herself to want to commit suicide and prove consent—reveals an ignorance of the very nature of our society.

Society is based on kinship, on interdependency, on networks of support, both in the private and the public sphere, and ultimately on trust. It is underwritten by tradition and conventions which for centuries have been given the protections of the law. At the basis of this whole structure, though it is unfashionable to say so, is the conviction that human life is sacred. Despite the Bill’s conditions, its alleged limitations and restrictions, it strikes a hammer blow at a civilisation supported until now by law, custom, kinship and trust throughout the centuries, whether in peace or war, but now struggling to keep afloat.