Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) voted 69 to 57 to reject the proposal that would have allowed adults that have been given six months or less to live the ability to get a cocktail of lethal drugs from a doctor, to self-administer them and to die, reports The Guardian.
The bill previously passed the Scottish Parliament last year to be further examined. However, it was defeated following an intense debated over concerns regarding if disabled and infirm people were protected from coercion.
Proponents say there were plenty of safeguards to keep the wrong people from using the process, but Dr. Gordon Macdonald, CEO of Care not Killing in Scotland, says it was modeled after the law in Oregon.
“Doctors started interpreting terminal illness as being refusal of food. So, there have been cases of people with anorexia, for example, who have been given assistance to end their life,” Macdonald recalls.
He says that everywhere assisted suicide laws have been implemented, the standards have expanded.
“Canada is the worst system in the world for expansion. We all know that. The Netherlands has been expanded to — without a formal change in the law — so that they now euthanize disabled infants up to 12 months of age if the patient is severely disabled,” Macdonald states.
Macdonald says it's inevitable that government bureaucrats would see assisted suicide as a money saving measure. The British National Health Service is nearing collapse because of its debt, and its far cheaper to kill a patient than it is to pay for extended medical care. That rational is often laid on the person considering taking their own life.
“It would never be explicitly stated, but people would come to understand that essentially they should do the decent thing and save their family the family costs of social care,” Macdonald says.
