Sheila Clare Hollins – formally known as Baroness Hollins of Wimbledon in the London Borough of Merton and of Grenoside in the County of South Yorkshire – is a Catholic crossbench peer who has served in the House of Lords since 2010.
She is distinguished by 40 years of clinical experience, first in general practice but mostly in psychiatry. She is a past president of the British Medical Association, a past president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a former chair of the BMA Board of Science and president of the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund.
The Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry of Intellectual Disability at St George’s, University of London, is also the founder of the Books Beyond Words project to help disabled children; she herself is the author of 40 titles in the series.
Baroness Hollins, 76, came to the attention of the public, however, when a man rendered psychotic by drug abuse launched a ferocious knife attack on her daughter, Abigail Witchalls, paralysing the young mother for life.
Years of media intrusion that followed the stabbing meant that Baroness Hollins would emerge as a leading campaigner for tighter regulation of the British press and for higher media standards.
Today she also fights for the rights of disabled and mentally ill people and as a result is a staunch opponent of attempts to change UK law on assisted suicide and euthanasia.
During a debate on the Assisted Dying Bill of Baroness Meacher in the House of Lords on October 22, Baroness Hollins warned fellow peers, for instance, that “autistic people and people with mild learning disabilities were given physician-assisted deaths in the Netherlands, rather than addressing the underlying issues of inequality, loneliness, feeling a burden or inadequate support”.
She spoke passionately about how scientific research showed that doctors were “seemingly influenced by their own assumptions about quality of life”, and how ingesting poisons in assisted suicide often resulted in botched rather than peaceful deaths, with the victims sometimes taking days to die.
She also forcefully made the case that assisted-death laws introduced with seemingly the toughest safeguards invariably and rapidly descended a slippery slope to horrors unforeseen by many of those who supported such measures.
Although she drew on abundant empirical evidence to make a case on scientific grounds alone, it would be forgivable to conclude that Baroness Hollins might also be shaped by her own experiences and by her Catholic belief on the sanctity of life.
Her faith came to her from her father, who was educated by the Jesuits at Stamford Hill, London, and who trained as a City solicitor before he went to fight as a captain in the Battle of Normandy.
He returned from the Second World War wounded both physically and mentally, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after having seen his men butchered by “friendly fire”, and disabled by injuries to his leg which were prone to recurrent infections for the rest of his life.
The family moved to South Yorkshire and Sheila was educated by the Sisters of Notre Dame in Sheffield, while at home her father imparted the Jesuit tradition of free inquiry and taught his children how to inform and use their consciences.
Sheila emerged from her formative years as a confident young woman who was determined to study medicine at university. But first she spent a year in Nigeria, at the age of just 18, teaching science in a Catholic school for girls run by an order of nuns.
After she married Martin Hollins and had a family of her own, she gravitated toward Jesuit spirituality when her children were small, often attending Mass at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Wimbledon.
She was later attracted to the Benedictine charism when a good friend became a monk and invited her family to visit Worth Abbey. For the next 30 years the family would spend every Easter at the Sussex monastery, with Baroness Hollins joining the Lay Community of St Benedict, which she describes as “phenomenal”.
The monks became their friends and when Abigail was stabbed the abbot made sure that one of the fathers was always on hand to provide pastoral support to the family for as long as it was necessary.
The safeguarding of the weak and the vulnerable is today a subject extremely dear to Baroness Hollins.
In 2010 she agreed to work closely with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor when he was commissioned by Pope Benedict XVI to undertake a visitation of the Archdiocese of Armagh following the dreadful reports of clerical abuse in Ireland.
She fought to ensure that the voices of the victims and their families were properly heard during the inquiry.
In 2014 Pope Francis appointed Baroness Hollins as a member of the new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Today the baroness is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Centre for Child Protection.
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