Following the House of Common’s vote in favour of assisted suicide earlier this year, campaigners against the controversial practice have rested their hopes on the House of Lords potentially blocking the passage of the bill.
With the bill expected to reach the Lords on 12 September, one peer has made her concerns on the issue abundantly clear.
Baroness Claire Fox has written of her “serious reservations” about the proposal, saying that “it will fundamentally change the relationship between the state and individuals”.
Of particular concern to Fox is the fact that many safeguarding proposals made by MPs were voted down by the Commons or not even discussed at all.
Fox also questioned the fairness of the parliamentary process, with the committee responsible for examining the legislation “stacked with a majority of supportive MPs”. Even the experts called in by the committee to provide evidence came disproportionately from those already in favour of assisted suicide.
When the legislation reaches the Lords, Fox said she would be arguing for an amendment that would allow hospices and care homes to opt out of conducting assisted suicides. “For me, this is a red flag”, Fox wrote in a piece for The Academy of Ideas.
Care home and hospice residents, Fox argues, should be able to live out their last days in peace without having their supposed carers offer them the chance to commit suicide.
Rather than normalise suicide, Fox argues that additional resources should be allocated to palliative care and hospices. Hospices, she notes offer significant public savings as they raise a lot of their existing funding through charitable donations. Additionally, the average cost of a two-week stay in a hospice, per patient, is over £1,000 less than in an NHS hospital.
Despite the significant public support for hospices, demonstrated by two thirds of their funding coming from charity, they still remain under-funded.
They also face additional tax burdens. While the NHS is exempt from the rise in national insurance, charity-run and private health and care providers are not. Fox, who is politically unaligned, said she would be supporting a Liberal Democrat proposal to address this discrepancy.
She said that “politically, we should resist the chilling reality of politicians pushing state-assisted suicide, at the very time when policies designed by parliament are so carelessly denying crucial end of life care and facilities”.
