Why I hope the Scottish Parliament rejects assisted dying this week

Not that I expect my opinion to make the remotest difference, but as the Scottish Parliament is about to make one of the most consequential decisions in its history, I thought I'd offer my opinion anyway.  I don't know about anyone else, but I find it deeply disturbing that not all that long a period of time before I was born, in the 1960s to be exact, Scotland was still a country in which the state took the lives of its own citizens in the form of capital punishment.  I once had a look at the death certificate of Henry Burnett, the last person to be executed in Scotland, and there's nothing all that remarkable about the contents of it - the cause of death is curtly given as "judicial hanging", his residence is given as the prison in Aberdeen, and the informant (who would normally be the next of kin) is the prison governor.  Everything about it just says "this is totally routine".

I can't imagine how much more disturbing I'd find it to live in a Scotland where a culture of death has been reintroduced in a completely different but much more widespread form.  Death certificates giving state-assisted suicide as the cause of death would become extremely routine, far more so than was the case with the death penalty - 5% of all deaths in Canada are now assisted suicide, and it's likely that we would follow suit. If you could guarantee me that the only people who would die under the new system would be single-minded, determined individuals who had freely chosen to avoid suffering, and who had not been coerced or malignly influenced, either directly or indirectly, then probably my attitude would be different.  But anyone who actually believes that is astoundingly naive.

If this legislation goes through, there will be people who die for economic reasons - either because they've been told they are a burden or because they assume that other people regard them as a burden.  There will be people who die because of treatable depression or low self-esteem or personality disorders.  There will be people who die because doctors actively put the idea into their heads.  For the first time since 1963, society and the state will be deciding that some people are better off dead and actually making them dead.

I hope this bill is rejected. If it's not, I'm not sure I'll even recognise this country in the years to come.

Incidentally, when I spoke out a few weeks ago against Ash Regan's bid to introduce the Nordic Model on prostitution law, Stuart Campbell rather outrageously implied that I must have been motivated by self-interest, ie. that I must be someone who pays for sex myself.  I'll be interested to see what dark or cynical motivation he'll ascribe to me in this case.  It's true that I was brought up a Catholic, and that probably does influence me, because my default setting is that life is sacred unless there's an exceptionally good reason.  But I'm not sure that's such a bad principle to live by, and it's fair to say a great many atheists take exactly the same view, even if the terminology they use is different.