A councillor with cancer who would have chosen assisted suicide in a ‘moment of despair’ if it were legal, has said Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill causes her “deep, visceral, personal fear”.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which passed Third Reading in the House of Commons last month by a narrow margin, is expected to receive its Second Reading in the House of Lords in September.
However, an independent councillor for Carpenders Park who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2017, Rue Grewal, condemned Leadbeater’s Bill saying “I feel really passionately, I’m fuming that we lost it by 23 votes”.
“Had it been there then, I wouldn’t be talking to you now”.
The 54-year-old quit her job after her diagnosis and lived with her parents, who were also her carers. While she is now a district councillor and working with Watford charity One Vision to fight for cancer support and is “living the best life I can in the shifting ties of a life-limiting condition”, she did not always have such a positive state of mind.
She said that “I didn’t even want to do my treatment. My mental health was so bad because I’d just been diagnosed”.
The councillor underwent “a moment – or period – of despair that felt permanent, but wasn’t”, and said that people “can convince yourself that it would be better – for you, for everyone – if you just slipped away”.
Cllr Grewal told a local paper that “I would have gone down that road”.
“I just don’t want people to be written off and think that’s the easy option,” she added.
“That’s what I thought, that I was a burden”.
Cllr Grewal said that Leadbeater’s Bill causes her “deep, visceral, personal fear” due to its lack of protections and safeguards.
“This Bill would put a price on my head”
Public figures, such as Lord Kevin Shinkwin, who himself has a disability, have also voiced serious concerns about the assisted suicide Bill. Lord Shinkwin said it “would put a price on my head”.
“I am a disabled person”, he said. “I cost the NHS, over the course of my lifetime, probably several million pounds to keep me alive”.
“This Bill would put a price on my head – on the head of so many disabled people”.
When asked if he feared he would not be alive today if the assisted suicide law were in force, Lord Shinkwin said “I think you have hit the nail on the head”.
“Absolutely. I was in intensive care a few months ago, and had a doctor come over to me when I was extremely vulnerable and said, ‘Have you considered assisted dying?’, I would have felt under real pressure to do that”.
Spokesperson for Right To Life UK, Catherine Robinson, said “Councillor Grewal, like many other people with serious illnesses or disabilities, recognises the acute threat that the assisted suicide Bill imposes on them. It is completely understandable that in the process of coming to terms with a serious diagnosis, someone might experience despair and feelings of being a burden. This is a clear reason why the legalisation of state assisted suicide is so dangerous, because it preys upon those in a vulnerable state, whether intentionally or otherwise”.
“The Bill only succeeded by a very narrow margin and, hopefully, it will be defeated in the Lords”.
