The Bishop of Aberdeen has spoken of his distress over a terminally ill friend who travelled to Switzerland to take her own life and said Scotland must not go in the same direction of helping people to die.
Bishop Hugh Gilbert said the experience of the woman, whom he met when he was abbot of Pluscarden Abbey in Moray, had given him a personal perspective into the assisted suicide bill currently going through Holyrood.
The friend, who was in her 50s and single, travelled alone to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich in the late stages of her cancer.
He said: “She said she was not worried about the pain of dying, but that she did not want to be a burden to others. I know that there were others, including myself, and those who were professionally qualified, who would have been willing and able to care for her and who would have regarded it as a privilege and not a burden.
“She did not want that and I found that distressing. It just seemed so unnecessary and sad. She was a very loveable, good person, she had many friends.
“I feel that practitioner-assisted suicide is unnecessary, unethical and uncontrollably wrong.”
He went on: “There is a kinder, wider, warmer and fuller way of dealing with death”
Bishop Gilbert intervened as independent MSP Margo MacDonald, who has Parkinson’s disease, gathers support for her Assisted Suicide Bill which would permit the right to die for the terminally ill or those with deteriorating progressive conditions, subject to a strict set of safeguards.
Westhill man Alexander Collie, who also has Parkinson’s, spoke out in favour of the move this week, saying he did not want to be a burden to his loved ones as his illness advanced.
Bishop Gilbert said he feared patients and their families could be put under “huge pressure” to consider assisted suicide as an option.
“If Mr Collie was sitting here, I would hope to help him overcome the fears that he has about what lies ahead,” he said.
“These fears are very understandable but I would want to stress things such as the quality of palliative care that is available.
“As a wider issue, we begin our lives dependent on others and is it really such a terrible thing, or is it really undignified, to be dependent on the care and support of our loved ones and the professional skills of others at the end of our lives?”