Letter: "Is this where it ends?"

Alison Britton’s excellent article (Journal, February 2014, 16) is timely. If successful, Margo MacDonald’s second introduction of a bill on participation in another person’s death is unlikely to result in ethically-based legislation.

Ms Britton’s article illustrates why this is so. Looking to other jurisdictions for prospective practicalities, a sort of pick ’n’ mix exercise, is putting the cart before the horse. Doing so implies that legislation is needed or desirable before any consensus of its morality has been addressed and resolved. Moreover, it is necessary to distinguish between Western medical ethics and morality. Margo MacDonald’s previous attempt predictably highlighted the ease with which assisted suicide and euthanasia conflate. References to “dignity” only serve to muddy the waters, inasmuch as they presuppose that death when brought about by a third party somehow dignifies the process.

The circumstances in which the bill proposes that death of another person may lawfully be caused are a field of heterogeneous mines. Some people are proposing that such circumstances ought to include, for instance, unrelievable unremitting extreme pain, or tetraplegia, or even that the person is expected to live for only a short time. One of the many fundamental questions which has not been answered definitively is whether it is correct, as I have heard many physicians claim, that all pain can in fact be at least palliated. Moreover, it does not help that the debate is bedevilled with euphemisms, for example referring to “the ability to hold the medication” (sic), when what is being spoken of is plainly a lethal dose of poison.

The bottom line is that what the bill proposes tramples on the firmly held beliefs of many faith communities.