Analysing the Assisted Dying Bill [HL] debate 2021

Abstract

This paper considers the number of speeches which treat central topics in the House of Lords second reading of the ‘Assisted Dying Bill’ (October 22, 2021). It summarizes some of the principal arguments for and against the Bill according to the main categories of discussion. These were compassion; palliative care; autonomy, choice and control; legal and social effects. In summarizing the arguments thematically, it is possible to see the current state of the debate and how concerns are shared on either side, even if approaches to and proposed solutions for those problems are different. The paper concludes that the essential source of disagreement lies outside of the arguments raised, and therefore that any change in the law is not likely to arise from political consensus.

KEYWORDS:

• Assisted suicide
• assisted dying
• compassion
• palliative care
• autonomy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Prof David Albert Jones for discussing this paper with me, and for the helpful comments I received from the reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All references to the debate are taken from the text-version available via Hansard (Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) 2021).

2 Many of the Lords referred to voluminous letters and emails received from members of the public on this matter, and this implicitly and explicitly impacted the debate. Nevertheless, these members of the public form a self-selecting group, and these views were then further filtered through the interests, opinions, and experiences of the Lords themselves; it is thus right to say that the debate reflected public opinion only to some extent.

3 Though every attempt has been made to accurately count every speech for the arguments treated in this article, some may have been missed through a different choice of expression or human error.

4 By ‘idealist’ the author means to refer to the philosophical positions that are contrasted with ‘realism’—the a priori ‘ideal’ of the autonomous individual being a mental construct which is not dependent on the reality of human life. Such an unrealistic understanding of autonomy was met with a counterfactual when The Lord Bishop of Chichester drew attention to the most vulnerable in society who have no family or friends. Such persons may, he argued, ‘have had no experience of being given autonomy or power over their lives; at the end of their lives, they are woefully ill prepared for taking responsibility for their death’ (col. 491, para. 3). The ideal of the autonomous individual is not revealed as a universal truth, but as a construct arising from a particular view of life.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Christopher M. Wojtulewicz

Christopher M. Wojtulewicz is the Education and Research Officer at the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, and a Free Research Associate at KU Leuven.