Lord Moylan (Con)

My Lords, I rise to speak to a couple of amendments that I have in this group. I start by responding to what the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham, has just said. I think that he misconceives his opponents—indeed, if I may say so, our opponents. They do not regard the offer of assisted suicide as an ideological act but simply as the offer of a different medical treatment, and this is one of the great divides between us. There are those of us who will not accept that offering to kill somebody or assist them in killing themselves can constitute a medical treatment. I say that purely as a preliminary and without relevance to what I am coming to, which is Amendment 166, which I shall speak to briefly. This is a minor and technical amendment. It arises from the fact that the Bill, because it has this elaborate bureaucratic process, creates lots of decision points; if you made a decision map, it would be very complicated as you passed down through it. There is one here in Clause 5 that needs correcting or improving. It says in subsection (3): “Where a person in England or Wales indicates to a registered medical practitioner their wish to seek assistance to end their own life in accordance with this Act, the registered medical practitioner may (but is not required to) conduct a preliminary discussion”. Now a “preliminary discussion” is a technical term in the Bill. It is a key that opens up the path to assisted suicide—it is not just any old discussion that happens to come early, but a technical term. The registered medical practitioner may at that point have the preliminary discussion, but they do not have to; but subsection (6) makes clear what they do have to do, which is to refer somebody to a place where they can get information about how they can have a preliminary discussion. My point is that the person making the inquiry about assisted suicide does not actually have to be ill. They might be asking—and quite wrongly asking—about ending their life, without coming within the scope of the Bill at all. I suggest that to avoid the poor doctor being driven off on these two impossible and irrelevant courses, we add to subsection (3), after the words “in England or Wales”, “who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness”. I should have thought that the noble and learned Lord would be willing to add that in the interests of clarity, to try to straighten out some of the complexities that the Bill, through its complications, has created. Amendment 152 would do something that many other amendments in this group seek to do: it would prohibit a doctor or another health professional from initiating a discussion about assisted suicide. So many speeches have been made already about why this is a valuable thing to do that I am not going to attempt to repeat them. Indeed, even the story about my late father that I was going to tell noble Lords has been trumped by the very moving stories from my noble friend Lord Evans of Rainow about his mother and grandmother. Everything that I wanted to say has been said.