Baroness Prentis has reflected on the “deep concerns” her battle with cancer highlighted about assisted suicide.
Writing in The Independent, the Peer spoke of the toll that radiotherapy has taken on her mental health, as well as her physical health. She warned that such effects have not been adequately considered in the recent assisted suicide proposals.
In April, Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of life) Bill timed out in the House of Lords amid a thousand amendments to counter its flaws.
Lady Prentis, who previously served as Minister of State for Work and Welfare, stated: “We must speak clearly about depression as a side effect of many treatments, and as a natural part of living with pain and uncertainty.”
She explained: “I think about how I’ve felt during treatment and it deeply concerns me that the bill makes no provision at all for doctors – or indeed society – to care about the psychological impacts on patients.
“It flips on its head our entire approach to looking after people in their darkest moments.”
The Peer said: “Campaigners argue that there’s nothing in the bill to stop progress on palliative care, but that’s to dismiss the realities.”
“It is as Simon Stevens, former chief executive of the NHS, identified, ‘remarkably cheap’ to introduce assisted dying, while the costs of doing something with palliative care are ‘far greater’.”
She warned that rather than giving people a choice, assisted suicide legislation “will instead push people, particularly the vulnerable and those less well-off, towards a single fatal option”.
“We have to understand that introducing assisted dying into an NHS where palliative care is not available to all is not a neutral act.”
