Suicide doctor arrives in Scotland to campaign for right to die

Preisig, who visited Glasgow on Saturday as part of her campaign to have assisted dying legalised across the world, said she hoped her approach to the old and suffering will become a model adopted in Scotland and other countries.

She said her big wish was that assisted dying would become accepted "like abortion".

Preisig left Dignitas four years ago and set up her own assisted dying service, The Eternal Spirit foundation, so that she could have the freedom to pursue her campaign.

Since then she has helped in over 170 deaths - with two-thirds involving cases of "suicide tourism" from outside Switzerland, including six from Scotland.

Though MSPs rejected the Assisted Suicide Bill last year by 82 votes to 36, Preisig is still optimistic.

“Scotland is quite religious and religion is always something which blocks assisted dying completely," she said.

"But I also know that Scotland can discuss abortion very well. And I do not understand how a country can accept abortion, but not assisted dying.

"This makes me hope that some time it will be accepted here."

Last year, the 58-year-old doctor triggered controversy when she assisted in the deaths of Scottish cousins from Troon, Stuart Henderson, 86 and Phyllis McConachie, 89, who travelled to Switzerland to die.

There was widespread concern that the pair were helped to die in spite of not having had a “terminal illness”.

Speaking ahead of a talk at Glasgow's Mitchell Library for Scottish end-of-life campaigning group Friends At The End, Preisig said: "They did not want to go to a nursing home. They wanted to die together as they had lived together for forty years.

"They were both very old and together they could just manage, but he was almost completely blind and she was having problems with hearing, arthrosis (degenerative joint disease), all these old age illnesses that reduce the life quality to such a minimum that you just want death to come and not to wait any more.”

Preisig said having to travel such a distance caused the Troon cousins, McConachie and Henderson, additional suffering.

“It would have made have been so much easier for that couple if they had been able to do it at home," she said.

"It was very hard on them to come to Switzerland, just doing the trip.”

The pair were over 85 years old, which for Preisig is significant, since it is an age at which she believes a great many people have incurable diseases and are suffering.

“If somebody is more than 85 years old," she said. "I do not want to interfere with their wish to die if it is well thought over.”

Though suffering is a normal part of life, Preisig said, she also believes there should be limits to what we can expect people to endure.

“What if suffering is there 24 hours a day and you are at the end of life and you know that it will definitely not get better, the rest of your life will be the same suffering or worse?" she said.

"You should never compare humans with animals, but what we do to certain humans we would never do to a dog.”

Preisig witnessed that suffering in her own father, who after a stroke left him unable to speak, tried to kill himself. Eventually she took him to Dignitas to die, and was with him when he passed away, with his head on her shoulder.

In Scotland and globally what she campaigns for is not only the legalisation of assisted dying, but good regulations.

Presig said she has too many requests for assisted dying to cope with. “Because of this I can’t give the assisted dying quick enough, and then I get these nasty mails - ‘My husband has shot himself because you have not been able to accept him quick enough.’ And I feel so responsible," she said.

However, commenting on Preisig's visit Gordon Macdonald of Care not Killing, an alliance which opposes assisted suicide, said: “The Scottish parliament overwhelmingly rejected assisted suicide not that long ago because they felt it wasn’t safe for vulnerable.

"We don’t see that anything has changed and see no need for further debate.”