Assisted Dying Bill
Latest: Assisted Dying Bill, May 2006
The House of Lords has blocked a bill that would allow terminally ill people to be helped to die.
Lord Joffe's bill, which had its second reading on Friday 12th May 2006, proposed that after signing a legal declaration that they wanted to die, a patient's doctor could prescribe a lethal dose of medication that the patient could take themselves.
Only people with less than six months to live, who are suffering unbearably and deemed to be of sound mind and not depressed would be able to end their life under Lord Joffe's proposal.
Peers spent the day in a passionate debate on whether or not it was right to allow a person who was terminally ill to be given drugs they could then use to end their own life.
Lord Joffe said: "We must find a solution to the unbearable suffering of patients whose needs cannot be met by palliative care."
Peers backed an amendment to delay the bill for six months by 48 votes. (148 were in favour and 100 opposed.)
Lord Joffe said the move was intended to end the debate, but pledged to reintroduce his bill at a later date.
The government has said it will not block a further hearing of the bill.
The debate highlighted divisions between supporters of the right to die and those who want better palliative care.
Amongst those Lords against the bill were the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, Lady Finlay, a professor in palliative care and Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster. They urged more to be done instead to improve palliative care for terminally ill patients. These Lords were also supported by disability campaigners.
Opponents to the bill demonstrated outside Parliament and submitted a petition to Downing Street which was signed by 100,000 people.
The bill's supporters said doctors should be able to prescribe drugs so a terminally ill person suffering terrible pain could choose to end his or her life.
These included Labour's Baroness David aged 92. She said:
If I were terminally ill, I believe I would be the only person with the right to decide how I died, and whether I preferred palliative care to assisted dying.
It would provide me with an additional option on how to end my life, which I would find tremendously reassuring.
Baroness David, Labour peer
Mark Slattery, of the charity Dignity in Dying, formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, said the campaign to introduce an assisted dying bill would continue. Julia Millington of the ProLife Alliance welcomed the Lords' decision and stated they would continue to resist any change in the law.