Assisted Suicide

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

It is a great honour to participate in this debate, and I pay tribute to those hon. Members who have spoken from personal experience and personal testimony. That is so very powerful. But I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), who spoke powerfully about what I would call the degree of group thinking that seems to occur sometimes in the Chamber. We all revert to a fairly simple, comfortable mean, around which we can all collate, and that gives me great concern.

We have heard many powerful arguments today, talking about individuality, individual rights, the fact that it is my body and that I should decide what happens to it. That fills me with great concern. We have heard the word “compassion” used over and over again, to the point where perhaps it has lost all meaning in this Chamber. The definition of compassion, fellow feeling, is sometimes lost in the debate. The compassion we should be showing when considering the most vulnerable is also a matter of putting ourselves in their place, because compassion is not about feeling sorry for them, but about identifying with their concerns.

As legislators, we should be here to protect the most vulnerable in society, but I worry that, by allowing moves towards more assisted suicides, we are not fulfilling that role. Yes, people might arrive at what they consider to be a rational decision that, because of a disability, a progressive illness or some other condition, their life is no longer worth living. With all the language of individual rights that we have heard left, right and centre today, perhaps that is where society has got to and where the currents of social change have brought us, but I fundamentally reject it.

I place a value on my life, but I place the same value on the lives of every single Member in this Chamber, because in my view all human life has equal value. If we decide that our own lives are no longer “worth living”, we make it harder for a person with an identical condition, disability or prognosis to take a brave decision, to strike out and say, “Actually, I want to keep on living. I do not want to succumb to the group-think that says I am now a burden on society.” It is not for society to decide the value of human life. It is not even for one single individual to decide that their life is no longer worth living, because by doing so they diminish the right of every other human being to decide that their life is worth living.

We can imagine two terminally ill people with almost similar prognoses, yet we do not know what might happen to them, as the hon. Member for Belfast East (Naomi Long) made clear. Palliative care is actually guess work. It is hoping for the best and trying to do the best for the patient, but we can never know what the final outcome will be. I am very concerned today. We often use the cliché, “the slippery slope”. I feel that we are skidding faster and faster down a slippery slope in this Chamber today, and that causes me grave concern.