Recommit To This Urgent Work

Dame Sarah Mullally writes:

As a nurse I sat in cancer wards with patients as they came to terms with a terminal diagnosis, and I was often there in their last moments too. Moving from nursing into ordained ministry means much of my life has been spent at bedsides alongside people as they cope with suffering and death. These experiences, underpinned and informed by my Christian faith, are the reasons I am against changing the law to allow assisted suicide. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill returning to the Commons this Friday is not only damaging to our shared understanding of the value of life, but it also places vulnerable people at risk.

Throughout my nursing career I was conscious of inequalities in healthcare. While the NHS was designed to eliminate these, they persist nonetheless. During the pandemic there were higher rates of illness and death in some communities than others; black women are more than twice as likely to die in or after childbirth than white women; and 25 per cent of deaths of people with learning disabilities could have been avoided through timely and effective healthcare. As many pointed out during debates on the last Bill, and as the evidence from overseas warns, we must not get to a place where the more you experience health inequalities, frailty or disability, the more likely you are to choose an assisted death or deem it better than being a burden.

Over the last two years in Parliament, the closer we have looked at these issues, the more faults have been exposed in this proposed change to the law. It is striking that there is no disabled person’s organisation or professional medical body that publicly supports the Bill before MPs this week. Many experts have criticised the absence of safeguards, and have raised serious concerns over the impact on the elderly, disabled, prisoners, and victims of domestic abuse.

Instead, we must turn to the urgent challenges before us: the resourcing of palliative and end-of-life care, reforming adult social care, reducing waiting lists and tackling health inequalities. Our job in the House of Lords is to improve Bills passed to us by the Commons, and sometimes to ask MPs to think again. The Lords is not simply a rubber stamp, and this is not just about making a bad law better. It is about what kind of society we want to be. Do we really want a society that involves healthcare professionals in the deliberate ending of lives, which offers death as though it were medical treatment? Are we creating a truly compassionate society if we endorse the view that some lives carry less value than others?

Christians and those from other faith groups see this debate as important because we believe in creating a society that reflects the best of us, based on the principles we derive from scripture, which affords equal dignity to all human lives. We have lived experience with those nearing death or on the margins of society, and, above all, we carry a belief that it is hope, not fear, that should guide us. As the debate continues in Parliament, my hope is that we spend as much time thinking about the “why” as we do the “what” and “how” of assisted suicide. Beyond a simple appeal for choice, what is driving the desire to see death as a state-provided cure for suffering?

We have a deeply embedded cultural commitment to suicide prevention, which must also apply to those who are terminally ill. For those individuals requesting assistance with suicide, what are the driving factors? If the answer is that the care that they need is unavailable, or that they feel like a burden, or that they fear pain, then we must ask more pressing questions about how we shape a society and build an NHS that rises to these challenges. As a nurse I saw the transformative effect of specialised care on pain at the end of life. There is hope for improvement if we extend access to this care to the one in three people who do not currently receive it. We can prioritise this – and we must – for the day that the state opts to provide death instead of supporting life to its very end is a tragedy indeed.

We must be mindful that to change the law is to change society. If passed, the Bill will signal that we are a society that believes that some lives are not worth living. That would become our state-endorsed position, and the NHS would be active in its delivery. To care or to be cared for is not always easy, but it is to be human. We are all dependent on and responsible for one another – families, friends, communities and citizens. I pray that we would recommit to this urgent work of truly caring for one another and say no to this Bill.