Tebbit: My wife said I’d be better off without her
LORD Tebbit yesterday said his wife Margaret once told him ‘You’d be better off without me’ – as he spoke out against a change in the law to give some terminally ill patients the right to die.
The former Tory party chairman said the comment by his wife – paralysed in the IRA Brighton bomb – illustrated how a change to the law would put disabled or ill people under pressure to ‘do the decent thing’ and end their lives for the sake of their families.
He spoke as peers debate a private members Bill put forward by Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor.
It would allow doctors to prescribe a lethal dose to the terminally ill who have six months or less to live and request it. It was given an unopposed second reading in July after a ten-hour debate.
Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of those voting in favour – even though he has previously opposed the move. The Bill yesterday moved on to its next stage and, in a debate, Lord Tebbit said there needed to be changes so there was some ‘deterrence against wrongdoing’ – to stop people putting pressure on others to end their lives.
‘At the moment, if somebody wrongfully puts pressure on, or wrongfully assists, a suicide, they know that the law is there and that its hand may fall on their shoulder. As I see it, if we enacted these measures we would only be adding to the procedures, not to the deterrents against wrongdoing.’
Lord Tebbit said his wife had been in constant pain for the past 30 years since the 1984 bombing. He said: ‘I fear for the day when she will say again to me what she said to me a little while ago: “You know, you would be better off without me”.
‘Pressure can be brought to bear to make people who are perhaps approaching the end of their lives – although I hope my wife is not – to “do the decent thing”. These amendments do not do anything to avoid that.’ However, yesterday Labour’s Lord Campbell-Savours said there were people who ‘desperately want out’.
Despite being ill for 31 years, such a course of action had not crossed his mind. ‘But one day it may and I want that right – and I don’t want the courts to interfere in it,’ he said.