In the context of our responsibilities as a wider society, we are grateful to the medical, nursing and care staff who support our loved ones in their last weeks, days and hours. Sadly, however, palliative care is underfunded and limited in Scotland, and our Parliament should focus its energies on improving palliative care rather than on contemplating assisted suicide or euthanasia.
The private member’s bill to introduce assisted suicide for those aged sixteen and over, recently published in the Scottish Parliament, amounts to a rejection of the common responsibility we owe to each other and to those who are ill and dying.
Campaigners call it ‘assisted dying’ when what is really meant is assisted suicide. Palliative care and the process by which families and communities accompany and support those in the final moments of their lives is what we all usually mean by assisted dying. What is now being proposed is that doctors hand a lethal concoction of drugs to a patient to kill themselves. It is a direct, intentional action to end the patient’s life and truly crosses a Rubicon in Scotland.
Read it carefully and read it all.
We heard the Scottish Catholic bishops letter against the assisted suicide bill in Scotland read out at Mass at Castlebay, Barra this morning. A very well-argued document which deserves wide dissemination.
— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) April 28, 2024