S4M-13258 Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

The Presiding Officer (Tricia Marwick): The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-13258, in the name of Patrick Harvie, on stage 1 of the Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill.

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Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP):

I find myself the 32nd speaker in the debate. It is a well-balanced, well-organised debate and the Presiding Officers deserve congratulations.

I recognise the integrity of members who are on the other side of the argument from me. How we support our fellow citizens as their faculties decline with age, infirmity or disease is a genuine issue that grows greater with time as medical science and practice change.

I agree with Patrick Harvie’s sentiments, if not all his words, when he criticised the present arrangements as

“the most open and ill-defined legislative framework that we could possibly have”.—[Official Report, Health and Sport Committee, 13 January 2015; c 12.]

However, I have come to a different answer to that conundrum from him. As the last speaker before him, I will try to sum up some of my responses to what has happened in the debate.

In particular, I found fascinating Richard Simpson’s description of the contribution of a profoundly disabled individual who was dying. He emphasised the significance of that person’s contribution. I and, I think, others in the debate fear that a measure such as the bill might deprive us all of the benefit of such opportunities.

I took from what Alison McInnes said—not her words—that she was concerned about the normalisation of suicide. Again, that concern applies to many of us.

George Adam, who is on the other side of the argument from me, powerfully said that the potentially bereaved should not oblige the terminally ill to live on. That is an absolutely fair point. Liam McArthur expressed it slightly differently when he said that the right to life is not a duty to live.

Michael McMahon powerfully informed the debate by quoting Professor Boer’s journey from support for assisted suicide, through examining the practical effects, to opposition to it.

From the start, my instinctive reaction was to oppose the proposal. I was brought up in a doctor’s household, steeped in support for life, compassion and assistance for the dying, so it could hardly be otherwise.

My father was proud to live and work under the strictures of the Hippocratic oath that he took as a medical student, which not all medical students took or take. The origin of that oath in a Greek cult that focused on excluding patients from doctors’ decisions about their future and keeping secret the details of the medicines used in their treatment is hardly an encouraging basis for decision making.

By the time my father took the oath, it was seen more simply and had discarded its primary objectives of protecting the physician’s monopoly and preserving the secrecy of his or her methods. It used to say:

“I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.”

The physicians who continue to wrestle with the issue are, in the bill, confronted with a choice between helping people who can have a quality of life before them and assisting people who wish to leave life a bit early.

In the past, it was simple enough—doctors did not need to struggle to maintain life when life itself would not do so. Those without perception of the world in which we live and those without prospect of resuming a meaningful quality of life need not be treated. Nature could follow its course.

Nanette Milne mentioned the doctor-patient relationship. At critical times in our lives, our relationship with doctors is very asymmetric. We throw ourselves into their hands, and we may be insensible of the life-sustaining or life-threatening actions that they have taken to promote what they understand to be our best interests.

I congratulate those who have wrestled with the issue in committee. They have risen to the challenge, and their report is a model of clarity, with integrity of reasoning. It informs us and, like many of the speakers in the debate, it makes it clear that, at best, the bill leaves unanswered questions. Others have described it as fatally flawed, and I share that analysis.

This is not a whipped debate; rather, it is one in which we must all individually engage with what is before us. We must make our individual decision and be accountable for it. We are talking about people’s lives.

I have talked with the dying about their end. I have agreed actions, and inaction, with relatives and friends about their future and about my future. I have sat at the bedside of death. I have laid out the dead. For me, death is no passing stranger—I will not be alone in the chamber in saying that.

At the end of what has essentially been a discussion with myself, I have found that it boils down to the simplest of questions. How would I feel if I knew that the doctor approaching me to provide treatment in my extremity had assisted another to an early exit from life when I so eagerly wanted to stay? Even the slightest appearance of a doctor’s bias towards death would damage my relationship with that professional. Therefore, I will follow my instincts and vote against the bill.

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