B

Baroness Hayman (CB)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 13 March 2026

Debate

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Contribution

My Lords, I have found some of this discussion quite difficult to compute with my own very limited—non-doctor—experience of end-of-life care and relatives who have been dying. The noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, spoke as if there was a very binary division between assisted dying care and palliative care. Yet the cases that I have been involved with and seen very closely have been of people very definitely frail and at the end of their lives, and where the range of options they wanted to talk about were not simply pain relief. This whole time, no one has mentioned the right of people to exercise autonomy, to stop eating and starve themselves to death. Does the doctor not consider what happens in those circumstances and talk about options then? There is the option, of course, to turn off life support. There is the option—which my mother chose—to refuse any blood transfusions. Doctors talked her through how that would reduce her life expectancy.

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