Reverend Dr. Rory Corbett:

I will respond. Listening to what has been said, and coming from faith we have been invited as faith organisations, what interested me given what has just been said is how much we appear all to concentrate on the secular side and say what we are proposing entirely mirrors what the secular world is saying in terms of human dignity and human authority, etc., rather than the value of people and the value of community and so forth. There is a feeling that anyone who is prepared to espouse faith strongly, and I do not mean to be insulting, in this sort of situation feels inhibited. With a different audience we could have been taking a very different line but still coming back to the same point on it. Yes, I am surprised but also impressed at how, without any collaboration, all seem to take a similar approach, which has been to emphasise how what we are proposing is seriously matched by the worries and anxiety of the secular world. We are seeing it through the courts and the decisions they are handing down and we are seeing it in what is going on around the world. Just looking at it, we are seeing changes all the time.

Looking back at this whole debate, the original debate started with an organisation called the Euthanasia Society. "Euthanasia" then suddenly became a bad word because of its implications that we were actually were killing somebody and people did not like that. Then it became dying in dignity, death in dignity, and now it is assisted dying or physician-assisted dying. There is a slippage in terminology. There has definitely been slippage in the what is allowed legally in various countries. We do feel inhibited to get up and trumpet too loudly, be it in the marketplace or more quietly in the confines of a parliamentary establishment.