Legal guidelines aimed at clarifying the law on assisted suicide will not be prepared in Scotland. The director of public prosecutions in England and Wales has spelled out a range of factors to be taken into account when deciding on cases. However, Scotland's top law officer, Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini, said it would be inappropriate for her to publish detailed guidance. Ms Angiolini said the legal landscape in Scotland was different. In response to a letter from Liberal Democrat MSP Jeremy Purvis, Ms Angiolini said the statutory offence of assisted suicide did not exist in Scotland. However, she said involvement in a suicide might amount to homicide and that was up to Scotland's "different system" of public prosecution to determine.
A powerful arthritis drug, judged too expensive for patients in England and Wales, has been approved in Scotland. The National Institute of Clinical Excellence (Nice) provisionally ruled that Tocilizumab was too costly for NHS patients south of the border. However, the body's Scottish equivalent has recommended patients in Scotland be treated with the drug.
A woman who found out she had HIV when she was pregnant with twins was infected by her boyfriend who had known he had the virus for nine years. She was among four women unaware that Mark Devereaux, 41, had the virus when they had unprotected sex with him. The 28-year-old woman chose to have an abortion after discovering she had contracted the virus. Devereaux admitted four charges of culpable and reckless conduct. Sentence was deferred for reports.
Terminally ill or severely disabled patients as young as 16 will be able to seek help to end their lives in Scotland under proposals to make the country the first in the UK to legalise assisted suicide. Margo MacDonald, the independent MSP, today unveiled a Bill that she hopes will allow those whose lives have become intolerable a dignified death at home. If the Bill were to be passed Scotland would become the only place in the UK where it would be legal to help someone to end their life.
The new Scotland Parliament bill to legalize assisted suicide–which I noted in an earlier post, permits disabled or dying teenagers access to “end of life assistance”–clearly includes active mercy killing. Note that since the method of killing isn’t specified or limited, it would seem that any method agreed upon by the suicidal person and the killing actor would be legal, theoretically including being shot in the head, so long as it “allowed a person to die with dignity,” which is in the eye of the dying person, it would seem, and caused “a minimum of distress,” which a bullet to the head would provide. And it is very clear that the actual suicide assister/killer need not be the patient’s physician or, for that matter, even a health care practioner.
The abortion rate has dropped for the second year running in England and Wales, statistics show. But experts said it was still too early to say whether there was a downward trend. The total number of abortions was 189,100 in 2009 - a rate of 17.5 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, according to the Department of Health figures. This compares to 18.2 in 2008 and comes after a general upward trend for the past 40 years which peaked in 2007. The abortion rate in Scotland also fell last year to 12.4 per 1,000.
An author who has argued for assisted suicide has been appointed adviser to the Holyrood committee scrutinising MSP Margo MacDonald's bill calling for sick people to be given the right to die. Pro-life campaigners are angered by the appointment of Alison Britton, the co-author of The Case For Assisted Suicide, to her position as the committee's only adviser and sought assurances that she will be impartial. If passed by the parliament, MacDonald's highly emotive bill could see terminally ill or permanently physically incapable people deciding to end their lives legally. Gordon Macdonald of the pressure group Care Not Killing has written to Ross Finnie, the Lib Dem MSP who chairs the End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill Committee, to express his concerns. "Alison Britton co-authored with Prof Sheila McLean, a book entitled The Case For Physician Assisted Suicide and a report titled Sometimes a Small Victory," Macdonald said.
Police are trying to establish the circumstances surrounding the death of a Glasgow man whose mother took him to a Swiss clinic to die. Helen Cowie told BBC Scotland's Call Kaye show she helped her son Robert, 33, commit suicide after he was left paralysed from the neck down. Mrs Cowie, of Cardonald, Glasgow, said her son went to Dignitas in October and "had a very peaceful ending". Strathclyde Police said they were not investigating the death at this time. However, a spokesman added: "The matter is being given consideration in an effort to establish the circumstances." Mrs Cowie said her son was paralysed in a swimming accident three years ago.
The Forum's Bright Ideas programme provides an exciting opportunity for individuals to spend a period of time - anything between a few days and two months - in residence at the Forum. With comfortable, modern offices on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, we offer our visitors time and space to undertake a programme of work tailored to their own interests that can also contribute to in some way to the Forum's aims and objectives. The scheme is open to anyone concerned with the social dimensions of genetics, genomics and the new life sciences, whether natural or medical scientists, medical practitioners, social scientists, artists, writers and musicians, policy makers and others working in public service and civil society, and individuals from the worlds of industry and commerce. Financial assistance is available for travel, accommodation and subsistence.
Dr Iain Kerr came under fire from Sir Graeme Catto, a former president of the General Medical Council (GMC) which registers UK doctors and now chairman of Dignity in Dying – a group which wants to give the terminally ill the option of killing themselves. Sir Graeme, who lives in Aberdeen, said he disapproved of the help Dr Kerr gave to elderly patients who were intent on suicide. Dr Kerr, who was a GP at Williamwood Medical Centre in Clarkston, East Renfrewshire, confessed to supplying sleeping tablets to a couple who wanted to end their lives together. He also revealed he had advised another pensioner how to use anti-depressants he was taking to kill himself and visited the patient while they took effect. Sir Graeme said: "Dignity in Dying is an organisation that is committed to working within the law to change the law. We simply do not condone healthcare professionals from medicine or nursing or any other group taking matters into their own hands. In Iain Kerr's case that is w...
He is not a typical campaigner. But behind his quiet manner is such a firm belief that assisted suicide should be legalised in Scotland that he has taken the extraordinary step of describing how as a GP he helped patients who wanted to end their lives. He did not embark on his medical career to do this. Instead, he said, he formed his views through reading and experience with patients over the years. Surprisingly he said Dame Cicely Saunders, credited with founding the hospice movement, made an impression on him early on. Dr Kerr, an atheist, is a volunteer driver for a hospice today. He said: "Cicely Saunders noticed doctors and nurses actually spent much less time with people with a terminal diagnosis and these people became more isolated as their needs increased. I think I was for a long time aware of the appropriateness of doctors discussing end-of-life issues or at least giving patients an opportunity to raise the subject."