Would you trust this lot with assisted dying? The Scottish parliament’s record on issues of personal liberty has been pretty dire. Yet MSPs seem mustard-keen to introduce medically-supervised suicide as proposed by the Liberal Democrat MSP, Alex Cole-Hamilton. His Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, published today, is the third such Bill to hit Holyrood and the betting is that this one will go the distance.
I’m not entirely sure this particular parliament possesses the moral standing to legislate on pot holes, let alone euthanasia
‘Too often’, says Cole-Hamilton. ‘Dying people are facing traumatic deaths that harm both them and those they leave behind.’ He’s not wrong, and the Bill has widespread public support according to opinion polls. Its many celebrity advocates, like Dame Esther Rantzen, hope its passage, next year, will pave the way for assisted dying across the UK.
So what could possibly go wrong? Well, in a legislature like Holyrood, with no revising chamber and a surfeit of virtue-signalling politicians, a great deal. I’m not entirely sure this particular parliament possesses the moral standing to legislate on pot holes, let alone euthanasia.
And let’s not beat about this semantic bush: that’s what assisted dying means. Look up any definition of euthanasia and it will read something like : ‘the termination of life by a physician at the patient’s request to end unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement’. Mr Cole-Hamilton may quibble with that and insist there’s an armoury of safeguards to prevent people dying who shouldn’t. But once this particularly lethal genie is out of the bottle it will be immensely difficult to put it back in.
The Netherlands was one of the first to introduce assisted dying back in 2002. Physician-assisted dying is now available for patients who have a voluntary and well considered ‘death wish’ and suffer from a medical or psychiatric condition that is unbearable and irremediable. A 29 year old woman Aurelius Brouwers, unable to cope with her mental health issues, took advantage of this law in 2018 and drank poison supplied by a doctor.
And why not? Why should people with chronic medical ailments which don’t happen to be terminal be denied the right to end their lives when they wish? Isn’t that the point of this legislation: to give back control?
In Canada, when Medical Aid in Dying, or MAID, was introduced in 2016, it was only for people whose death from illness was ‘reasonably foreseeable’ and definitely not for psychiatric patients. That was challenged in the courts and MAID will soon be available to people with mental illnesses too.
More than 13,000 people used MAID in Canada in 2022, a rise of 30 per cent on 2021. It is now one of the main causes of premature death there. And there is credible evidence that people with disabilities are seeking assisted dying because they can’t afford to sustain their treatment.
This is a particularly slippery slope because it involves human rights. As soon as the Scottish euthanasia law is passed, as night follows day distressed people will be saying ‘me too’ – arguing similarly on grounds of non-discrimination that it’s their right to choose. The Dutch courts have now ruled that euthanasia should be available even to children.
Perhaps there is some legislative safeguard that could prevent euthanasia creep, but in all the years I have heard this subject debated I’ve yet to hear it. Which is why many disability groups are deeply troubled by assisted dying. They are not alone. At least half of British doctors remain to be convinced of the merit of it, even though their trade union, the BMJ, thinks it is only a matter of time before the law is changed to allow voluntary euthanasia.
Yet in the BMJ’s own survey of doctors, 45 per cent said they would not participate in administering life-ending drugs to patients. Their mission statement is supposedly ‘do no harm’. Assisted dying would turn the Hippocratic Oath into a hypocritic oath. And Scottish MSPs will not be the ones who have to live with the consequences of their law.
Who would trust Holyrood with legalising euthanasia?
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28.03.2024
Would you trust this lot with assisted dying? The Scottish parliament’s record on issues of personal liberty has been pretty dire. Yet MSPs seem mustard-keen to introduce medically-supervised suicide as proposed by the Liberal Democrat MSP, Alex Cole-Hamilton. His Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, published today, is the third such Bill to hit Holyrood and the betting is that this one will go the distance.
I’m not entirely sure this particular parliament possesses the moral standing to legislate on pot holes, let alone euthanasia
‘Too often’, says Cole-Hamilton. ‘Dying people are facing traumatic deaths that harm both them and those they leave behind.’ He’s not wrong, and the Bill has widespread public support according to opinion polls. Its many celebrity advocates, like Dame Esther Rantzen, hope its passage, next year, will pave the way for assisted dying across the UK.
So what could possibly go wrong? Well, in a legislature like Holyrood, with no revising chamber and a surfeit of........
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