Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is indeed an honour to open the second day of our debate on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. I pay tribute to my honourable friend Kim Leadbeater, who represents the seat in which I was born, for bringing the Bill to us from the Commons. I thank my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer for the clarity and excellence of his introduction to, and leadership on, this Bill.

As my noble friend the Chief Whip said, last Friday’s debate was outstanding and the House of Lords at its best. There are many questions to be addressed as we do our job in scrutinising the Bill, and the questions posed come from those of us who support the Bill and those who do not.

I am greatly relieved that my noble friend Lady Berger and my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer, in their joint email to all Peers, say that their agreement will allow the Bill to go through all its stages in your Lordships’ House. With respect to those who disagree in principle with assisted dying, it is important that we remember that the Bill came to us from the Commons, and has undergone significant scrutiny and change. Our job is to scrutinise it further and improve it if we need do so. It is not our job to kill this Bill.

I was saddened last week when the noble Baroness, Lady May, spoke about this being a suicide Bill. People have written to me in the last week, very distressed. They add things such as, “We are not suicidal—we want to live—but we are dying, and we do not have the choice or ability to change that. Assisted dying is not suicide”.

I hope that today the House will continue to conduct this debate with compassion. I shall read an extract from one of the many letters that I have received, which explains the importance of compassion; I cannot better it. This concerns a woman, Pamela Fisher, a lay preacher in the Church of England and who has terminal cancer. I am reading these words with Pamela’s permission. She says:

“I live in terror at the prospect of how my final weeks of life may be. I have seen other family members (brother and father-in-law) at the end of their cancer journey, and I know what may lie ahead. Even the best palliative care has its limits. This is the dead weight of fear that I carry around with me, all the time.


I am not asking anybody to help me to shorten my life. In supporting the Bill, I seek to have the choice to shorten my death in my final weeks should my pain and suffering prove unbearable. As a Christian, I believe in loving my neighbour as myself and, on this basis, I seek the same choice for eligible others.


As a lay preacher, I cannot reconcile Christian compassion with the status quo that obliges people to suffer a drawn-out process of dying in pain when this is against their will and they have the capacity to choose. Church leaders often apply the concept of the ‘sanctity of life’ to resist assisted dying. The sanctity of life is rightly central to Christian faith. For me, the sanctity of life is about honouring the life of every individual, and this necessarily includes providing the care and treatment they need including, of course, excellent palliative care. I reject the assumption that the sanctity of life requires terminally ill people to undergo a distressing and painful death against their will.


I am asking for you to support this Bill. It would be tragic if the Bill were to fail now, having passed through the Commons with a clear majority. It would be personally devastating for me and for countless others. The majority of the UK population supports the Bill, and there is also a majority among Church of England congregations, despite the Church leadership’s energetic lobbying against the Bill.


Please remember, this is not about shortening life; it is about shortening painful and distressing ways of dying. Despite the best palliative care, around 20 people die in agony and/or awful distress every day”.


This is Pamela’s plea for compassion, and mine too.