“MY mum shouldn’t have had to do that. My mum shouldn’t have to have starved herself to death.”
SNP MSP Elena Whitham had warned her audience to have “hankies at the ready” before she started a heartfelt plea to legalise assisted dying in Scotland. It would prove a prescient comment.
Whitham spoke in front of an audience of SNP delegates about her experience in the final weeks of her mother Irene Todd’s life, and how a “more humane” approach to euthanasia could have made it better.
“I’m here because of my mum,” she said. “[The doctor] said to her: ‘If I was a betting man, you’ve got stage four cancer and it’s terminal’. It was her lungs. They were filled with cancer. And from that moment we had her for five weeks.
“No sooner after that diagnosis but she was gone. And I will never forget those five weeks, or what happened in them.
“The only control she had from then on was not to eat or not to drink … but she was terrified to tell us what she was doing.
“That was what she wanted to do, but she didn’t know how to tell anybody that she couldn’t face the horror of drowning in her own lungs.”
Whitham described being told that her mother was drifting out of consciousness, probably for the final time, and rushing to her side.
“I will not forget that terror in my mum’s eyes,” the MSP said. “Because she woke up and realised she wasn’t dead. The terror on her face, I will never forget.
“A more human method would have allowed us to have the conversation that we couldn’t have. Her energy was all focused on how to kill herself, how to face what was coming, how to die with as much dignity as possible.”
SNP MSP Elena Whitham on why she supports the legalisation of assisted dying in Scotland pic.twitter.com/KYJlSflWiZ
— Xander (@xanderescribe) October 8, 2022
Speaking at the same fringe event at the SNP conference, Humanist Society Scotland chief executive Fraser Sutherland said that 11 Scots die a “bad death” like Whitham’s mother every week.
He said that 76% of the 14,000 responses to LibDem MSP Liam McArthur’s proposed Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill consultation had supported it.
“The public already overwhelmingly backs this legislation and it’s time the parliament got on board,” Sutherland said.
The Humanist Society Scotland head pointed to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, which allows people to choose when they die, and said that someone travels from the UK to that clinic every eight days.
However, McArthur’s (above) bill will prevent Scotland becoming a similar destination for those looking to die with dignity, as the choice will only be open to people who have been resident in the country for 12 months.
Further safeguards in the bill include the person being terminally ill, of sound mind, and able to “pull the trigger” themselves, so that no one else is implicated in the death.
The members’ bill has received the backing of enough MSPs to move to the next stage. It will be the second time the Scottish Parliament has seen a bid to legalise assisted dying.
The first attempt was rejected in 2015 by 82 votes to 36.
Opponents of the bill, sometimes on religious grounds, have called for more support for end-of-life care.
The SNP fringe event was run by the Humanist Society Scotland, Friends at the End, and Dignity in Dying Scotland.
