Witnessing a painful, protracted, death is a common reason for supporting assisted suicide: a term I use rather than “assisted dying”, which many people understand as including palliative care. So, my heart goes out to Liam McArthur MSP, whose stated motivation in proposing his bill to legalise assisted suicide in Scotland was that “dying people are facing traumatic deaths that harm both them and those they leave behind”.
However, as both a doctor and ethicist who witnessed the mismanaged dying process of my own father in hospital before he was moved to a hospice, I am concerned about many of the elements in the proposed legislation on assisted suicide.