Assisted dying debate should be met with an open mind

YOUR columnist Kevin Mckenna appears to be enthralled by his interview with Canadian palliative care expert Professor Leonie Herx (“A warning on the dangers of a law on assisted dying”, The Herald, February 6). It is easy to see why. In your report of that interview on February 4, the professor paints a lurid and highly disturbing picture of Canada’s assisted dying programme six years after it began. She cites cases of vulnerable people requesting, or being offered, euthanasia in what appear to be quite inappropriate circumstances.

Interestingly, though, she does not say what proportion of those cases actually resulted in euthanasia. The professor blames the unintended consequences of the Canadian legislation on “subjective and loose interpretations of the law” and “non-compliance with safeguards and misapplication of both law and policy”.

In the context of Liam Macarthur’s proposed Assisted Dying bill in the Scottish Parliament, it is vital that we in Scotland try to learn all we can from the evidence of other countries where such legislation already exists, such as Canada. But for that evidence to be helpful, it must be both empirical and objective.

So what can we learn from Professor Herx’s assessment of the Canadian experience? First, I suggest that her claim that assisted dying legislation is not working as intended in Canada is not in itself evidence that the legislation is flawed, only that it is being misused. In that case, those responsible for its misuse must be held to account. If the problem persists, then the legislation needs to be strengthened.

Regrettably, much of the professor’s evidence seems to me to be neither empirical nor objective. Throughout the interview, and in the most emotive language, she makes a variety of very serious assertions. She refers to a capitalistic and predatory euthanasia programme, and to Canadian euthanasia laws being distorted and manipulated, leading inexorably to eugenics and a policy of survival of the fittest. She talks of affluent middle-class neo-liberals attempting to manipulate outcomes, with those made vulnerable by poverty or disability being put to premature and wrongful death.

These allegations are so serious that they cannot just be accepted without definitive supporting evidence. Professor Herx may have such evidence and she may have shared it with Mr Mckenna. Whether she did or not, he has not reported it and so we readers have no way of knowing whether her allegations are true.

The arguments for and against assisted dying are fiendishly sensitive and need to be approached with an open mind and with ultimate mutual respect. Supporters of Liam Mcarthur’s proposed bill want to be able to choose the time and manner of their own death in certain prescribed circumstances. We certainly do not want that choice to be forced on others who do not want it.

As a country, we should all be big enough to learn from the verified evidence of other jurisdictions so as to ensure that our own legislation is made as safe as it can be. Sadly, Professor Herx’s approach, enthusiastically endorsed by Mr Mckenna, seems to terrify us all into believing that any assisted dying legislation will inevitably result in state-endorsed killing. We deserve a more intelligent standard of debate than this. Iain Stuart, Glasgow