Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I had not intended to join this long list of speakers, but it has become increasingly clear that it is right to register all testimony in support of the Bill. I was not at first in favour of it, as I thought it could result in the exploitation of elderly or infirm people’s vulnerability, but as I saw the evidence, particularly from people with disabilities, I came to the conclusion that this choice must be made available. Perhaps I should declare that I am a patron of Humanists UK, but my conclusion in this case was not determined by the admirable way in which it has set out a systematic exposition of the issues.

My views were further strengthened by experience. I am in my 90th year, and I have seen all too many of my friends, and their partners, put under all-consuming stress and suffering by having to postpone an inevitable death, in great and continuing pain and increasing loss of capacity. I well understand those feelings myself. I have seen instances of those caring for people in those last but often prolonged stages taken over by care, helpless compassion and powerless sympathy, of which their dying companion explicitly wanted to relieve them.

I too would like to be able to relieve my family, as well as myself, of intolerable suffering—so how could I deny it to others? I recall, in one of the many debates on this subject that we have had in your Lordships’ House, when the late, much lamented Baroness Warnock asked: why should not old people be allowed to be altruistic? I have spent a large part of my adult life putting the interests of my children at heart, and I do not see why I should stop now. This does not feel to me like altruism, just a continuation of normal service—I hope my children are not listening to this.

The last point I want to make is the part played by other people’s opinions. Like most of your Lordships, I have received very many letters and emails about this Bill. It was striking that almost all of those against were professionally informed, well-marshalled arguments—if often with unusually similar turns of phrase—and many coming from the same email address. By contrast, those for largely wrote from lived and agonising experience, some not very articulately, and in not very educated handwriting. All through my Civil Service career I was conscious of less powerful voices, less well organised, whom it was difficult to reach but who were in the majority—rather like the opinion poll evidence of national feeling in favour of assisted dying. This reflects, of course, the verdict of their elected representatives in the other place; people who we need to pay attention to. I would like to do that now, and make available the compassionate choice about the last, momentous event in people’s lives. I conclude that it is nationally important that this Bill should pass through all its stages.