The Health, Sport and Social Care Committee of the Scottish Parliament has called for evidence on Liam McArthur MSP’s ‘Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill’. In the meantime, in the House of Lords, Lord Falconer has drawn second place in the Ballot for an Assisted dying for terminally ill adults bill.
These are but the latest attempt to change the law in the United Kingdom on this issue. The first attempt was in the House of Lords in 1936. In that debate Lord Ponsonby quoted from Thomas More. On the island of Utopia, someone with an incurable disease could ‘dispatch himself out of that painful life… or else suffer himself to be rid out of it by another.’ Lord Ponsonby invited peers to imagine what a dying patient feels ‘when he sees his friends around him and knows that he is only a burden to them’ (emphasis added).
