Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Mitchell Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mitchell (Lab)]

My Lords, on 9 October 2000, my parents-in-law, Jack and Ruth Lowy, committed joint suicide. He was dying and she had decided to accompany him on this last journey. Jack was born in Bratislava in what was then Czechoslovakia. The family were Jewish and following the events in Munich in 1938, they fled to Philadelphia. When war was declared, Jack went to Canada and joined the Czech division of the RAF. He survived a punishing war and then worked for British intelligence.

Jack went to Cambridge as a demobbed airman and became a brilliant scientist, a professor in biophysics, specialising in the movement of muscles. His work required him to conduct experiments on animal tissue. He spent much of his time using X-ray refraction in his lab at King’s College and at the Daresbury synchrotron in Cheshire. In those days, no one quite understood the long-term dangers of radiation, and protection was rudimentary. For him, it was fatal. In 1998, he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, which he knew was terminal. He told me, in his usual blunt way, “I know how this story ends and it is not pretty. I’m bloody well going out with my boots on”. Not much room for doubt on that one.

As he became weaker, they both cut themselves off from us, gradually then completely, so as not to involve us in their deaths. Letters were returned, emails bounced back, and telephone calls went to the answering machine. We were bereft. We had no one to talk to and, to be honest, when we tried, no one believed us. When we said there was a chance that Ruth would commit suicide along with him, people shook their heads in disbelief.

My wife in particular sensed that they would carry out their wishes. After all, they were both intelligent people who had carefully thought this through. There was no one to support Jack and no one on hand to help Ruth in what must have been hell for her. The main practical problem for Jack was procuring enough barbiturates to ensure one and then another successful suicide. He found a way. Being the scarred Holocaust survivor that Jack was, and the brilliant scientist that he had become, there was no way he was going to get the dosage wrong.

If there had been assisted dying legislation at that time, I am certain that things would have turned out differently. We could have talked about it openly, without the fear of legal consequences. We could have engaged professional help. I cannot be certain about my mother-in-law’s motivation to join him, but they both knew that his own suicide at home could well run the risk of her being charged with committing a crime as an accomplice. What I do know is that had this Bill been law, she probably would have chosen life. My family would have been spared a double bereavement that was unnecessarily brutal and psychologically damaging for us all. Not surprisingly, I support the Bill.