Assisted dying aligns with Tory principles
I have not always supported assisted dying. I shared many of the principled concerns that I’ve heard from colleagues over the years. But it was my constituents, in the Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield, who changed my mind. With tears rolling down my cheeks, I listened to deeply upsetting stories from Suttonians about the painful and undignified deaths of loved ones.
It’s not just been those who have witnessed how barbarous the current legal situation can be; it has also been those who are dying and want the opportunity to choose how to end their days.
I’ve also had the chance to hear from those further afield: doctors and legislators in places where assisted dying has been made legal. They faced much the same clamour of opposition to changing the law as we have seen here. Doctors faced opprobrium for acknowledging that a prohibition on assisted dying was causing real harm to their patients. Legislators were told that a vote on assisted dying opened the door to the most horrendous outcomes, that they would regret this vote for the rest of their political lives.
But they haven’t. Far from it. They have almost unanimously asked themselves: what took us so long?
The laws now active in 10 US states, every state in Australia, and New Zealand have created safety, transparency and reassurance around end-of-life decisions. Every year, a small number of dying people have gone through rigorous assessments with their doctors and been prescribed a medication to end their own lives. Two doctors have assessed them on their mental capacity, their prognosis, and the independence of their decision.
These laws are working well. In all those jurisdictions not a single case of abuse has been evidenced. The number of people who use those laws remains low – around one per cent of deaths; and around a third of those who go through the entire assessment process don’t end up using the medication. They, like so many others, see assisted dying as a safety net, as an insurance against the possibility of suffering in their final days.
None of those laws, based on the core principle that a person must have a terminal illness and mental capacity, have expanded their eligibility criteria. Not one of them has been repealed. Surely if those laws were as disastrous as we are being told, there would be some effort to restrict them further or get rid of them entirely.
Kim Leadbeater’s Bill takes those safety measures that are proven to work and builds on them. She builds in greater protection than anywhere else in the world. Her Bill will include oversight from the High Court, ensuring not only that the doctors have fulfilled their legal obligations, but that any further concerns can be investigated. More than a dozen additional safeguards are built in to her Bill which do not exist now for people in the United Kingdom.
The last big “free vote” – on an issue of conscience – in the House of Commons was the legalisation of same-sex marriage. I was inundated by constituents’ letters urging me to oppose the Bill. The Conservative benches voted in the majority against it, only passing with the support of our then coalition colleagues and the opposition.
Since then, I have lost count of the number of colleagues who regret voting against the legislation. Their friends and family members who have found joy in being allowed to marry the person they love, such a simple thing, have made them ask why they ever questioned it. What took us so long to recognise that gay and lesbian people deserve the right to marry one another?
I hope that my loved ones will never need to use an assisted dying law. But I know that I would want that choice for myself, and I know many of my colleagues feel the same. I know that the majority of my constituents would want that choice. Ultimately this is a matter of individual liberty, of choice, of trusting people to make decisions for themselves, rather than the state determining what choices we can make.
I hope that we will vote in favour of assisted dying on Friday. This is a vote of principle, a Second Reading, and if it passes, we will then go on to discuss in detail every line of the Bill’s content. I’m confident that, should this pass, in the years to come, we will ask ourselves: why did we wait so long to listen to our constituents and create this law?
Rt Hon Andrew Mitchell is Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield