Campaign Resources

What happens when you imagine teenage cries for help becoming a gateway to assisted suicide? How do you feel when you realise that this is already happening in Belgium?

Dutch law permits children under 1 year old (inc. newborns) with disabilities like spina bifida to be euthanised with parental consent under a eugenic policy, the Groningen Protocol.

It’s bizarrely inconsistent to increase support for state suicide prevention at the same time as normalising suicide by legalising state-assisted suicide. It sends a message to society that suicide is an appropriate response to any form of physical or mental suffering.

Legal euthanasia makes killing the norm, not the exception. There is a danger of it corrupting the whole practice of medicine.

Think this isn’t possible? It already happened. An Italian woman had an assisted suicide as she was lonely and ‘weighed down by aging and the inevitable loss of the looks of which she was proud.’

Personal autonomy—the choosing of the time and manner of one’s death— is fundamental to the euthanasia lobby’s campaign to change the law. But even expressly stating that you don’t wish to be killed by euthanasia, is no guarantee that you won’t.

If the main reasons why people seek assisted suicide are being “less able to engage in activities making life enjoyable” and “losing autonomy”, on what logical basis will you be able to prevent it from eventually being extended to people who are just “tired of life?”

How can you determine whether someone choosing assisted suicide has not been subject to undue influence?

Are some lives just of less value than others? In Scotland, we should support people with disabilities to live, not die.

If the politicians change the law, will the law change the politics?

There is no safe way to legalise ‘state-assisted dying.’ Canada shows courts overrule safeguards & extend euthanasia to others despite politicians’ best intentions.

Pain isn’t really the problem that drives assisted suicide.

The fear of future pain and suffering is often cited as the main reason why people might wish for euthanasia or assisted suicide, but when patients are cared for properly, they seldom want to end their lives.

Assisted suicide reduces the incentive to invest in palliative care & it increases the systemic pressure to end patient’s lives.

People who are vulnerable must be protected from feeling pressure to take their own lives.