Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Friday 13th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O’Loan (CB)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her helpful intervention.

There is a further problem. As drafted, there is nothing to prevent any other health professional—a nurse, health visitor or physio—raising assisted dying with a patient. Sometimes, patients form stronger relationships with these people than with doctors because they see more of them. It is essential, therefore, that there is no possibility of a warm-up conversation being initiated by a professional to ease the ground for the doctor when he wants to make his approach. It may be said that this would not happen, but we have seen ample evidence of situations in which cost savings to be secured by freeing up beds and ending treatment are regarded as justification for assisted death. We have, of course, seen situations in which a person who has suffered an amputation or has a terminal cancer seeks a wheelchair and is told the waiting list is two years, but that assisted dying can be provided tomorrow. Any situation in which assisted dying is discussed for the first time must be strictly patient initiated, tightly confined and take place through a clearly defined process.

Amendment 205, to which I put my name, as well as Amendments 207 and 207A and other amendments in the group, would prevent any discussion about assisted suicide with a person who has a learning difficulty or autism without a family member, guardian or independent person present. The effect of this would be to do what all professionals and caring organisations do when dealing with or engaging with people with such disabilities. I also support Amendments 317, 346, 457 and 512 in this group, which seek to protect those who experience feelings of suicidal ideation, which may be transient.

What about the doctors? The MDU, which represents over 200,000 healthcare professionals, is deeply concerned about the proposals in the Bill. The MDU points out that the position whereby doctors are not required to raise this but are still permitted to do so is the worst of both worlds for doctors because they would be liable to complaints in either situation. If the doctor does not raise it, a complaint can be made against them for not having done so; if they do raise it, a complaint can be made against them. As the MDU points out:

“Such proceedings can take a vast toll on doctors. The time taken; the emotional toll; the procedural concerns. This cannot be overstated”.


This is one of the many unintended consequences emanating from this clause as drafted. The clause requires substantial amendment to make it safe.

There seems to me to be a whole range of circumstances that you would want a doctor to be able to talk to the patient about. It is not simply, “We can offer you a way”, and they only talk to you and say, “This is the palliative care available, and only if you have heard that, seen it and chosen from it can we then talk to you about something different, which is assisting your death”. It seems to me—

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

As I understand it, the noble Baroness is talking about various possible options. Would she think it a good idea if the doctor were free to advise the patient to stop eating?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

We are obviously at that time of day.

As we have gathered, I do not want doctors to initiate raising assisted dying as a healthcare option at all but, if they do, I do not want there to be any linguistic whitewashing. Sarah Wootton, the chief executive of Dignity in Dying, wrote in her book Last Rights:

“We have to move away from idealised, sanitised, nursery-rhyme accounts of what death can be…towards truthful”,


no-BS—I have abbreviated that—and

“plain-spoken explanations of what could happen”.

Surely these words, which are very powerful, should also apply to conversations about assisted dying or assisted suicide. Let us ensure that, if a doctor is to raise it with patients, there is no attempt to hide behind idealised and sanitised nursery-rhyme accounts of what assisted death would be like.

That is why I was particularly keen to emulate this no-BS approach, which is why I added my name to Amendment 160 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor. This would ensure that, in any discussion that a doctor initiates, they make it clear what is being suggested—namely, that this about ending a person’s life. If a doctor said to you, “Would you like a dignified death?”, that might sound very appealing, but if they say, “Would you like me to give you a lethal drug that means that you can take your own life?”, it might suddenly feel a bit different. We genuinely need to say what we are talking about. A similar concern is raised in Amendment 167 by the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie. The doctor must not hide behind opaque language and euphemism that avoids spelling out clearly what they are suggesting and offering, from the first preliminary step to the ending of a patient’s life by, as I said, basically helping them take their own life.

My final point is that we are saving the doctors here. Doctors starting to suggest that you can end people’s lives will completely change the relationship between doctors and patients. You are forcing a doctor to think, “Is it in the best interest of this patient to die, with my help, through the ingestion of a lethal substance?” That must mess up the mind of a doctor, who is trained to keep life going as much as possible. It would erode trust in healthcare relationships moving forward because if, for example, your doctor suggested assisted dying and you said no, you would then have to go back and face the same doctor. I am not entirely convinced that I would be confident enough in the medical practitioner who had told me I would be better off dead to ask, “Can you help me extend my life a bit longer?” I might want to doctor-shop, as they say.

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

I am perhaps imagining the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, as a quivering wreck. If that is how she feels, you can imagine what it is like for most of us when we face our doctors, so the point was made very strongly.

There are so many good amendments here and I cannot possibly refer to all of them, but I want to drive home, by force of comparison, a point that arises from two things that were said—one by the noble Lord, Lord Rook, and one by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, who is no longer in her place. The noble Lord, Lord Rook, said that there is no duty under the Bill to raise assisted dying, which is obviously true. It is very important to pursue what that implies.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, said that by raising assisted dying a doctor is not performing a neutral act, so the question we have to ask is what is going on when a doctor proposes assisted dying. I am saying that if it is not a neutral act it is an ideological act, and that is not something appropriate for a professional.

I shall draw a comparison that will illustrate that point. The Government keep promising to introduce a Bill to ban conversion therapy—and I think that they will do so. The objection to conversion therapy is that it is a form of coercion of the weak and of exploitation, forcing an ideology on people that is considered to be wrong and exploiting their feeling of weakness. That is the danger we face here. Many noble Lords will object, of course—and they will be right—that conversion therapists are quacks whereas doctors are real doctors. In my view, that makes it even more important that the doctors stick to their professional obligations and do not start advocating things they happen to believe are right. If we think about it that way, we will see just how important these amendments are.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to a couple of amendments that I have in this group. I start by responding to what the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham, has just said. I think that he misconceives his opponents—indeed, if I may say so, our opponents. They do not regard the offer of assisted suicide as an ideological act but simply as the offer of a different medical treatment, and this is one of the great divides between us. There are those of us who will not accept that offering to kill somebody or assist them in killing themselves can constitute a medical treatment. I say that purely as a preliminary and without relevance to what I am coming to, which is Amendment 166, which I shall speak to briefly.

This is a minor and technical amendment. It arises from the fact that the Bill, because it has this elaborate bureaucratic process, creates lots of decision points; if you made a decision map, it would be very complicated as you passed down through it. There is one here in Clause 5 that needs correcting or improving. It says in subsection (3):

“Where a person in England or Wales indicates to a registered medical practitioner their wish to seek assistance to end their own life in accordance with this Act, the registered medical practitioner may (but is not required to) conduct a preliminary discussion”.


Now a “preliminary discussion” is a technical term in the Bill. It is a key that opens up the path to assisted suicide—it is not just any old discussion that happens to come early, but a technical term. The registered medical practitioner may at that point have the preliminary discussion, but they do not have to; but subsection (6) makes clear what they do have to do, which is to refer somebody to a place where they can get information about how they can have a preliminary discussion.

My point is that the person making the inquiry about assisted suicide does not actually have to be ill. They might be asking—and quite wrongly asking—about ending their life, without coming within the scope of the Bill at all. I suggest that to avoid the poor doctor being driven off on these two impossible and irrelevant courses, we add to subsection (3), after the words “in England or Wales”,

“who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness”.

I should have thought that the noble and learned Lord would be willing to add that in the interests of clarity, to try to straighten out some of the complexities that the Bill, through its complications, has created.

Amendment 152 would do something that many other amendments in this group seek to do: it would prohibit a doctor or another health professional from initiating a discussion about assisted suicide. So many speeches have been made already about why this is a valuable thing to do that I am not going to attempt to repeat them. Indeed, even the story about my late father that I was going to tell noble Lords has been trumped by the very moving stories from my noble friend Lord Evans of Rainow about his mother and grandmother. Everything that I wanted to say has been said.