There are certain concepts no civilised government should touch with a bargepole, and human euthanasia is top of them (your report, 16 July).
Creating medical provision for state-sponsored suicide – the converse of the premise of the NHS to keep people alive – is grotesque and any talk of "civilised discussion on the matter" makes one wonder about how low our society has yet to plummet in
its valuation of life.
Euthanasia of humans is a criminal offence for good reason. Quite aside of the dangers of vulnerable people being pressurised into it by relatives to ease the "burden" on them (despite a lifetime's tax burden to pay for it), most healthcare workers of a religious persuasion (Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, Wee Free, etc) will refuse point blank to have anything to do with it, and the potential psychological effects on those health workers who do become latter-day Crippens could be horrific – exacerbating the creeping callousness within the medical profession towards a public seen more as consumers than patients.
We are all dying from the day we are born, to speed up the process from self-pity insults the dead and dying who would love to have that time others would chose to bin. One patient euthanised on the back of a faulty diagnosis of inoperable terminal cancer would be one too many.
MARK BOYLE
Linn Park Gardens
Johnstone, RenfrewshireIt's interesting that Dr Calum MacKellar (Letters, 19 July) claims that Margo MacDonald "can never be objective" on the subject of assisted suicide, and also insists that "it is wrong to suggest that any person can ever lose his or her dignity". Are we to infer from this that anyone with a terminal illness who is suffering great pain and abject indignity is also suffering from a failure of objectivity and must accept that his life is dignified, despite his competent assessment that it is not?
Dr MacKellar's letter is composed largely of quotations from the website of the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, but he curiously omits their novel argument that people who request assisted suicide "are discriminating against themselves". This is an interesting (if unexplained) concept, but it seems more likely that the council itself is discriminating against terminally ill patients by refusing to acknowledge that they can make up their own minds about whether their lives are dignified. One sure way of failing to respect people's dignity is to insist that they accept your conception of it.
(DR) DAVID SHAW
University of Glasgow
Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow Stephen McGinty's article on Margo MacDonald's campaign was very moving and informative. Gratifying too that this is a devolved matter as one hopes that the Scottish Parliament really believe that the individual is responsible for the way he or she lives and dies. Let us hope also that they have the wit to separate out arguments of principle from arguments of the pitfalls of implementation as the Dutch clearly have.
However, what really disturbs me in this debate are the views, no doubt very influential, of Cardinal Keith O'Brien and his ilk. It is unbelievably arrogant for him to presume to know the mind and purpose of an Almighty God, if such exists.
Political leaders owe their power and position to the wider electorate who will hold them accountable. Let Cardinal O'Brien be answerable to his own conscience and those who share his views. By what mandate does he claim authority over those who find his beliefs incomprehensible, arrogant and not to say absurd.
EDWARD LINK
High Road
Auchtermuchty, FifeThe full article contains 599 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
