* CAMPAIGNERS fear hundreds of vulnerable people will lose their lives if new laws on assisted suicide are passed.
The Lords vote next week on an amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill which would let relatives help ill patients kill themselves without prosecution. The change is proposed by peers led by Lord Falconer.
* But former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has joined the chorus of calls to block it.
The debate was sparked after the parents of paralysed rugby player Daniel James, 23, were taken to court over his suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland - which featured in a TV documentary on the death of Professor Craig Ewert last year.
* Here Lord Carey tells why he is opposed to the change.
REMEMBER the Bridgend suicides? That heartbreaking spate of futile deaths by despairing young people.
Lord Carey, Former Archbishop of Canterbury
Lord Carey, Former Archbishop of Canterbury
Well, the Government is trying to make sure that sort of thing doesn't happen again.
One small part of its Coroners and Justice Bill, now before Parliament, makes clear that sick websites that promote suicide are against the law.
Full marks to the Government for that!
But the euthanasia lobby is trying to hijack it.
While the Government is trying to outlaw websites that encourage people to commit suicide, these opportunists are trying to make it do the opposite.
They are actually proposing that we should be licensed to help seriously ill people to kill themselves.
Yet making it legal to help someone commit suicide is just another way of encouraging it.
We're told it's all about compassion - that the handful of people every year who help friends or relatives to kill themselves shouldn't have to worry whether they will have to face the courts. In practice, that only happens if there's evidence of foul play; and that's rare - because we don't license and encourage it!
We're also being told by Lord Falconer that his amendment is only an innocent attempt to bring the law in line with the fact that Britons are already assisting people to fly to Switzerland to commit suicide and are not being prosecuted.
So it's just a technical change.
In those lights it can be seen as a wholly unnecessary change - yet if it succeeds it will overturn the Suicide Act 1961 and open the door to the unscrupulous and manipulative.
People who are seriously ill often talk about "ending it all", not because they really want to but because they think they should "do the decent thing" and spare their families a burden or stop wasting money on care homes.
And, though most relatives are kind, let's not forget there are greedy and unscrupulous ones too.
Mercy killers are hijacking the suicide bill | Lord Carey
SUICIDE: James, 23
This change in the law could lead some relatives, impatient for their inheritance, to cajole the elderly into an early and unwanted death.
Remember also, it is not only those who are in favour of assisting suicides who have had experience of the decline into suffering and helplessness of loved ones at the end of their lives.
For me, this is a personal issue because my family have been through this too.
One elderly relative always insisted, when she was fit, that if she ever became senile she would rather die than suffer the indignities that came from Alzheimer's.
But when it happened, she begged us never to leave her.
And we would like to think that as a family we provided her with a loving and happy environment as we cared for her and she eventually died a happy death.
Great strides have been made in caring for the vulnerable and dying since those days.
The achievements of the hospice movement have been extraordinary and their growth should be encouraged.
Yet the answer for those particularly painful and heartbreaking examples of suffering is not a complete change in the law on suicide, but a determination to provide the best palliative care possible.
At the moment the provision is patchy across the country, but this is an area which needs more resources.
In an ageing society we have to protect and care for greater numbers of vulnerable people than ever before. The medical profession is attempting to rise to this challenge.
Doctors themselves resist euthanasia because they know that it will change the nature of their sacred work overnight.
They know that their honourable profession has to have a strict code of ethics to ensure that every patient trusts their doctor with life and death decisions.
The worry is that although cases such as Dr Harold Shipman are rare, the public could come to see doctors as killers, rather than carers and preservers of life.
And although this change to the law does not amount to a free-for-all in euthanasia, it is a gradual step to that outcome.
The law we have now protects the sick and vulnerable.
What is being suggested is a charter for their exploitation. Parliament should have nothing to do with it.
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