HOLYROOD is set for another gruelling debate on plans to legalise assisted suicide in Scotland, with MSPs from across parties forming rival campaigns.
Last week, senior politicians including acting Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw, Green party chief Patrick Harvie, and former Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, launched a push to change the law, saying the status quo failed the people who face “the most terrible suffering”.
Yesterday, in a letter to the Sunday Times, MSPs including Tory Murdo Fraser, the SNP’s John Mason, and Labour’s Elaine Smith, hit back at their colleagues, saying such a law would be the “measure of a desperately cold, soulless society”.
They wrote: “Have we really become a society that says the best answer we can provide to those suffering in end-of-life situations is to help them kill themselves? Is that really all we can offer?
“That, to us, is the measure of a desperately cold, soulless society. We think that in Scotland today we are better than that.
“This issue poses serious questions for all of us. What sort of people are we? What sort of society do we want to be? What would such a law tell us about our nation? There’s a view it should be up to the individual alone to decide not just how to live, but how to die, and that this should be enshrined in law. The idea may be superficially attractive, but even for those with a liberal outlook, it is self-evidently obvious that taking a life will not only have an impact on one individual, it affects others, too.”
Suicide, they went on, should be regarded “as a cause for grief”.
Other MSPs opposing the change included Jeremy Balfour, Neil Bibby, Donald Cameron, Mark Griffin, Gordon Lindhurst, and Mike Rumbles.
Previous attempts to change the law on assisted dying in Scotland have failed.
A poll published this week found that nearly nine in 10 people in Scotland support legalising assisted dying. The Populus survey, commissioned by campaign group Dignity in Dying Scotland, this week found 87% of Scots backed assisted dying for terminally ill people with less than six months to live, with medical approval and safeguards.
Launching their campaign to change the law, Carlaw, Harvie, Dugdale and six other MSPs highlighted the case of Geoff Whaley, an 80-year-old with motor neurone disease who recently ended his life at a Dignitas facility in Switzerland.
The group wrote that they understand their colleagues’ issues with the plan, but said with careful thought and considered debate they could craft a law addressing the concerns based on other countries’ experience.
They added: “The uncomfortable truth is that we are failing the people we met in Parliament this week. We cannot go on pretending the status quo is acceptable – it is not.”
The politicians at Holyrood hope to have a formal consultation on assisted suicide towards the end of this parliament.
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