Member

I return to the reason why I rose, which was not just the word “nitpicking” that the noble Baroness mentioned but her belief that assisted suicide is part of palliative care. That was what she said, and that is the fundamental wrongness of this proposal. If you say that, then you are saying to people that, if you put yourself in the hands of doctors, they will be thinking of palliative care that includes this. That is not palliative care. Of course, nearly 50% of the people who hear about assisted dying think that it refers to palliative care, but by “palliative care” they do not mean that you are in fact inviting the opportunity to kill yourself; they see that as a wholly separate thing. All I am saying is that, if we want to protect people in general, we have to be quite clear that palliative care—looking after people in the very best way that we can at the most difficult time of their life—is utterly separate from the idea that they can instead decide to kill themselves. It is perfectly reasonable for some people to want to have that choice, but it must be a distinct choice. It must not be mixed up.