Meeting of the Parliament 27 May 2015
Thank you for the opportunity to speak, Presiding Officer.
It is clear that the subject divides opinion, and I think that most of us can accept that there are arguments on both sides. None of us wants to see unnecessary suffering, of course, especially if the person is close to us. Death is not a subject that many of us are comfortable talking about, but maybe our society today is unusual in that respect, as our culture in previous times seemed and other cultures these days seem more comfortable with the whole process of dying, and even within our society there is a variety of customs.
Against the desire to reduce suffering and manage one’s own death, it is clear that there is a range of arguments against assisted suicide. We are hearing a number of those arguments, but I want to concentrate on a couple of them. First, I want to concentrate on the impact on our suicide prevention strategy. The committee’s report on that topic, in paragraphs 269 to 280, was good. It is clear that we have problems with suicides, especially in Glasgow and the west of Scotland. Over the four years from 2009 to 2012, there were 3,059 suicides. Some 73 per cent of them were male suicides. The highest number of deaths was in the 40 to 44 age group, but there were more than 150 male suicides in the 20 to 24 age range. Glasgow has the third-highest suicide rate in Scotland; it had 17.2 such deaths per 100,000 over those four years.
It is tragic to hear those figures. People feel that ending their life is the only way out of their problems, be they financial, health, relationship problems or whatever. We need to do all that we can to show such vulnerable people that there are other and better ways of sorting out their problems.
I cannot put things better than the committee did in paragraphs 275 and 276 of its report, in which it said:
“enacting a Bill of this kind would undermine the aim of preventing suicide in two ways: (i) by seeming to contradict the wider suicide prevention message, or by watering it down with exceptions, and (ii) by ‘normalising’ suicide: this argument is that when law permits a practice, this is perceived as endorsement, and as society absorbs that endorsement, the general perception of the practice changes.”
I note Patrick Harvie’s comments on his not seeing evidence in other jurisdictions of increases in suicide generally, but we have been given evidence that shows Oregon’s suicides increasing, certainly in comparison with Scotland’s suicides, which, thankfully, have been reducing in recent years.