Simon Hoare
Main Page: Simon Hoare (Conservative - North Dorset)Department Debates - View all Simon Hoare's debates with the Ministry of Justice
Assisted Dying (No. 2) Bill
Simon Hoare Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Rob Marris
If my right hon. Friend looks at the figures again, she will find that for those people she mentions burden was not the major factor, but it was a factor, and people should be allowed to make a decision.
Rob Marris
No, I must make some progress now. I can take no further interventions, I am afraid.
The coercion of the vulnerable is the most difficult issue, for me and many people in the House and outside. That is where the context in which the Bill is being put before the House should be borne in mind. This Bill provides protection for the living. What we have at the moment is protection for the dead when it is too late. It is only after people die in questionable circumstances that the police and the prosecuting authorities investigate, and then a decision is made on whether a prosecution would be in the public interest. I make no criticism whatever of the prosecuting authorities or the police, who are doing the job and fulfilling the role that we in Parliament have asked them to do, but they are doing it after the fact—and the fact is that in many cases there are only two witnesses to what happened when the person died, and one of those witnesses is dead. There are safeguards in the Bill for the living: the two doctors and the judge.
In Oregon, there is not one documented case of abuse or misuse. There are many rumours and urban myths—the Barbara Wagner case is one of them. No one there has ever been charged with a crime. The Oregon health authority collects the data quite properly each year, as would be the case for chief medical officers under this Bill, and there are no documented reported cases of abuse in Washington state, Montana or Vermont.
The fact that other jurisdictions have this sort of legislation is not per se a reason for England and Wales to have it, but it does provide a significant body of evidence for us to look at. That evidence is felt so significant that in California it is likely that later today the upper chamber will sign off an assisted dying Bill and it will be sent to Governor Jerry Brown for signature. The indications are that he is very likely to sign it.
Mrs Spelman
I should like to make a bit more progress before I give way.
Assisted dying should be the absolute exception, not the rule. In practice, the law as it stands has seldom been used to convict anyone for assisting someone else to die. Strong laws protect vulnerable people. The existing law protects the elderly, the disabled and those who might otherwise feel pressured to die. It is difficult to prove definitively that someone has not been coerced. It would be almost impossible to pass a law that could definitively prove one way or another whether an elderly person had been coerced.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
The hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris) says that there has been a lot of misunderstanding about the Bill. There is no misunderstanding at all: the Bill would authorise doctors to provide a lethal substance for people to kill themselves with. That substance is not a “medicine”, as the Bill disingenuously describes it, but a poison. No wonder doctors oppose it, and we in this House should do so too.
The hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West says that the Bill sets out a clear procedure with multiple safeguards. What clear procedure? What safeguards? Let us look at the Bill. It states that doctors must be satisfied that a patient has a settled and voluntary intent to end his or her life. How should doctors be satisfied that the intent is settled? The Bill does not say. Would they need to see the patient once or twice, or over what period of time? The Bill is silent. What steps should doctors take to be satisfied that the intent is voluntary, and that there is no coercion behind the patient’s request? The Bill is silent. Given that Action on Elder Abuse reports that there are over half a million reported incidents of physical and emotional elder abuse in the UK each year, the Bill should be clear on that critical issue, but it is not.
Simon Hoare
It is actually worse than my hon. Friend suggests. Given the very low number of GPs who have indicated that they would seek a licence, it is more than likely that both doctors seeking to make the certification would not know the patient and therefore would not be able to tell whether they were more or less depressed or to assess their rate of degeneration. That is the fundamental weakness of the Bill.
Fiona Bruce
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Those doctors could not be sure, and they would not be able to assess the even more subtle internal pressure that an individual might feel to express a wish to end their life because they feel a burden. What special procedure is there in the Bill for the particularly vulnerable in our society, such as those with mental health or learning difficulties? There is none. No wonder Mencap and Scope oppose it.
The hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West speaks of multiple safeguards. Where are they in the Bill? I do not see them. Does he mean the provision that the decision should be referred to a High Court judge? If this was not so serious, it would be laughable. The judge would not have to meet the patient; they would only have to confirm the doctors’ decision, and in a time frame of 14 days, making independent scrutiny all but impossible. Absent will be the detailed, rigorous examination that the family court gives to life and death issues, such as turning off a life-support system. Gone will be the investigative powers of the Director of Public Prosecutions under the current legislation rigorously to investigate cases of assisted suicide referred to him. Removed will be the strong deterrent against malicious behaviour that the current law provides.
Nadine Dorries
I am not going to take any interventions, because so many people are waiting to speak.
In the 1980s, as a nurse, I had the privilege or the honour—I do not know the right word to use—to hold the hand of a young gay man when he was given a diagnosis of AIDS. It was not HIV, but AIDS—he was in a very bad way. He was given not six months, but 12 weeks. He is still alive today, as are so many of the other young men and women who were diagnosed at that time with HIV and AIDS and given fewer than six months to live.
Medical research ran ahead and found treatments for them to hold on to their lives for longer while even better treatments were developed. That race is still in progress: treatments are still being developed. We have now reached the point where somebody diagnosed with AIDS is far more likely to die of something else, but we would never have thought that in the 1980s. Many people present are probably thinking, “But this isn’t the 1980s,” but we did not know that AIDS was going to arrive in the 1980s and we do not know what is down the road, what new viral disease will land—it will probably be a virus, given the information we have—and what the AIDS of tomorrow will be. Six-month prognoses worry me, because no doctor can predict a life expectancy of six months.
I will use a personal case. Last August one of my closest friends visited her consultant after a series of tests had been ordered by her GP. At that meeting with the consultant, she was given 14 days to live. That was an accurate prognosis—it was accurate because it was 14 days. She went home, we got into bed and I spent 14 days on her bed. Her death was painless and peaceful; it was not for everybody around her, but it was for her, and those last 14 days were wonderful, until the very end when she was fast asleep and unaware. That is the beauty of palliative care today: no one needs to die a painful death. The combination of drugs that are administered to people in their final days ensures that they do not suffer pain.
The poison administered when someone makes the choice to take their own life, however, is not pleasant. They do not swallow a concoction of drugs and fall asleep. It is not a nice end. It is certainly not peaceful. They choke. It is not a good death. To people who argue that it is a good death, I say that it is not: it is painful and barbaric to die in that way.
I listened to the head of the hospice movement on Radio 4 this morning and I know of the fears and have read all the emails from people representing the hospice movement in my constituency. The hospice movement has very rightly highlighted that the pressure on people in hospices will shift over a period of time.
I want to make a final point. There are people all over the country who do not have a family member or relative as their next of kin. They do not have loved ones. For them, the next of kin is the state. It sends a shiver of fear down my spine to think that such a Bill might be legislated for and approved when so many people who are protected by the law may not have such protection in future because their next of kin is the state. When they feel that they are a burden or they feel under pressure, who will coerce them and who will feel the budgetary constraints involved in looking after them? I will end with that concern.