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THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW Highlighting best practice 64 | REVIEW OF PARLIAMENT less than six months to live. The present law forced many people facing a painful death to hoard drugs or put a plastic bag over their head, and they died alone to avoid implicating family or carers in their suicide. His Bill would not mean more death, but less suffering. He was opposed by another former lord chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who asked if it could be compassionate to confront a dying person with such a decision; but he did not want the Bill to be rejected at this stage, to allow further debate on the issue. Also opposed was the Most Rev John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, who rejected the idea that assisted dying was 'an assertion of human freedom'. Baroness Greengross, a former director general of Age Concern, focused on the need to help people who have become incapacitated and are physically unable to end their lives without help. They should have the same rights as the able-bodied, she said. One of the most moving speeches came from Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, who has spinal muscular atrophy. Speaking from her wheelchair, she said the Bill was about her, and people like her. 'It frightens me because in periods of greatest difficulty I might be tempted to use it,' she said. A similar view came from the Conservative former cabinet minister Lord Tebbit, who spoke of his wife, who was injured in the 1984 IRA bombing in Brighton. Carers were all too familiar with the moments of 'black despair' in which those they cared for would wish they were dead so their loved ones could get on with their lives, he said. And he warned that there would be plenty of human and corporate 'vultures' with an interest in pushing people into assisted death. On the other side of the argument, Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said he now believed assisted dying was 'quite compatible' with being a Christian, and the Conservative Baroness Wheatcroft described her mother's last agonised hours. She would have seized the option to die, she said. The Bill was given its second reading without a vote, with even its opponents arguing that a chance to examine the issues it raised in detail, in committee-stage debate, would be valuable. But, even if it is ultimately approved by the Lords, the Bill looks unlikely to be given debating time in the Commons, and so stands little chance of becoming law. But it will add to pressure for the next government to act, after the 2015 election. Baroness Campbell of Surbiton Lord Falconer proposed that doctors should be permitted to prescribe lethal medications to patients judged to have less than six months to live