The assisted dying bill, if it becomes law, will remove the burden of seeing a loved one die in pain, the campaigner Esther Rantzen has said, insisting its backers have got right the balance between helping those who ask for it and protecting vulnerable people.
The terminally ill adults (end of life) bill cleared the Commons with a majority of 23 votes on Friday, but must yet be debated by the Lords before returning to the Commons for consideration of any amendments they may make.
Rantzen said on Saturday: “I think people misunderstand when somebody says: ‘One of the reasons I wanted assisted dying was I didn’t want to be a burden’. Well, that’s how I feel, in the sense that, if I die in agony, that memory will be a burden for my family. Not because I’m awkward or inconvenient, I may be both those things, but because nobody wants to see a loved one die in pain. Nobody wants that.”
Asked if she had any doubts about the detail of the bill, she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think we have got this right. Having the committee stage [in parliament], with that committee rigorously looking at every clause and deciding to set up a multidisciplinary panel of social workers, someone versed in psychology, someone legal, so that they could examine it in each case.”
She said this measure made it “so rigorous and so safe. And, in other countries around the world which we’ve looked at because they’ve had assisted dying legalised for some time, it has not produced coercion.”
The legislation could face a difficult passage through the Lords, with critics poised to table amendments to add further restrictions and safeguards to the bill. It was suggested to Rantzen that peers could also choose to debate it for so long that it ran out of parliamentary time.
“I don’t need to teach the House of Lords how to do their job. They know it very well, and they know that laws are produced by the elected chamber. Their job is to scrutinise, to ask questions, but not to oppose.”
Rantzen, who turns 85 on Sunday and has terminal cancer, acknowledged the legislation would probably not become law in time for her to use it and she would have to “buzz off to Zurich” to use the Dignitas clinic.
The Paralympian and crossbench peer Tanni Grey-Thompson told BBC Breakfast: “We’re getting ready for it to come to the Lords and, from my personal point of view, about amending it to make it stronger … I do think there are a lot more safeguards that could be put in.”
The Conservative peer and disability rights campaigner Kevin Shinkwin said the narrow Commons majority underlined the need for peers to take a close look at the legislation.
The Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, who steered the bill through the Commons, said she hoped peers would not seek to derail the legislation. “I would be upset to think that anybody was playing games with such an important and such an emotional issue.”