Where there’sa livingwill there’s away
WEDNESDAY Amanda Ward’s assisted dying campaign group FATE want the authorities to modernise Scots system
incapacitated and can’t express your own wishes.
“It’s fine to have a conversation with your loved ones. But if they’re in the same car accident as you, or if you go at the same time, there needs to be something there to inform the medical professionals and the others to make these decisions at a time that’s extremely difficult and stressful.”
She thinks that all adults should do the same and 16 is about the right age to start thinking about death.
Amanda works for Friends at the End (FATE), campaigning to change the law on assisted death. A law graduate, she is studying for a PhD while lobbying politicians and academics.
Advance directives are a muddy legal area. Only one Scottish health board, Dumfries and Galloway, keep central records. In other areas, the system varies.
Amanda, from Glasgow, said: “There is no set template and no unified system. If you decide to write an advance directive, there is no central registry for them. “You have to give one to your GP, one to the ambulance service, one to your nearest and dearest and have one with you in case you get hit by a bus.”
This lack of clarity became clear when Holyrood rejected the Assisted Suicide Bill in 2015. Amanda worked closely with Patrick Harvie, the Green MSP who brought the failed Bill forward. FATE are regrouping and trying to configure a bill that will win the support of the Scottish Parliament.
Amanda reckons we are a decade behind the US, where the residents of six states have access to assisted dying. It was first legalised in Oregon in 1997.
She said: “Now 58million Americans have access to assisted dying, while we outsource the problem to Switzerland.
“I hope we can take the lead like we have on other issues such as equal marriage.
“I think it will happen in my lifetime. FATE think all adults who have mental competence and are terminally ill or have an incurable disease should be allowed this if that is their own persistent request. We, as adults, make all our own decisions: who to marry, whether to have children. It’s a recognised legal concept in Scots law that we can refuse or withdraw medical treatment for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all.
“Between 69 and 82 per cent of the UK public support a change in the law.”
FATE hear from people who are considering travelling to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich. It is, Amanda says, an imperfect solution.
She added: “There are people who are terminally ill who are taking their own lives. One person from the UK goes there every eight days.
“The Dignitas clinic can’t deal with the number of people who contact them. They want us to get our act together.”
Having to go to Europe has other consequences. Amanda added: “People are taking their lives sooner than they’d have to because they’ve got to be physically well to travel.”
And the heavy cost rules it out for many Scots. Amanda says it costs about £10,000 to have a Dignitas death. She said: “That raises equality and discrimination issues. Equality in life should be extended to equality in death.”