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Hello, I'm Susan Hume and this is the Yesterday in Parliament podcast. On Friday the 21st of November,

peers tackled the key issue of coercion in a further day of debate on the assisted dying bill.

The bill would allow adults in England and Wales with less than six months to live

to ask for help to die. There are more than a thousand proposed changes down for debate and

many hours spent on them already. So before a word was said, the government business manager, Lord

Kennedy, begged for good behaviour. Despite sincerely held views and differences of opinion,

we will at all times conduct ourselves with courtesy and respect for each other

and show the public watching our debates, the House of Lords, in the best possible light.

But the terminally ill adults' end-of-life bill is the most sensitive of issues, and there was

no hurrying debate on one of the most crucial parts, whether vulnerable people might feel pressured

into asking to die. There are safeguards in the bill already, but the non-party peer Lady

Finley, who's an expert in palliative care, wanted more, because coercion could be very subtle.

She explained what she meant.

It is the complaints about the heating bills.

Family carers being fed up at having to prepare drinks and food, groaning when asked for something.

So many ways to give the message that you're a nuisance and would be better off dead.

A conservative Lord Farmer said two friends of his with terminal illness had told him the very

debate had made them feel a burden.

This bill itself in a way is coercive. It gives oxygen to dark thoughts, which can loom especially large when our best

days seem to lie behind us. He said it was an atheist bill that assumed there was nothing

after death. Most of the peers who spoke were against the bill. Another conservative, Lord

...