MSP Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying Scotland Members Bill has faced fresh criticism from the Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, who said the Bill constitutes a “return back to the pre-Christian era, and a darker time in the past”.

Michael Robinson, SPUC Director of Communications, said: “We applaud Mr. Fraser for speaking out against this dangerous law that would put the most vulnerable members of our society at great risk.”

Mr. Fraser pointed to the historian Tom Holland’s book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, which argues that universal human rights, taken for granted today – such as equality and the inherent value of human life – ultimately derive from Christianity.

The pre-Christian world had no trace of these rights: “For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the lives of the poor, the vulnerable, and of conquered peoples, had no intrinsic value.

“The Spartans routinely murdered ‘imperfect’ children. The poor and weak had no rights. It was only with the coming of Christianity that attitudes would change, with a belief that all human lives were valuable.”

Dignity in Dying, advocating for assisted suicide, argues that it is a liberal reform that serves to increase an individual’s freedom over their own body.

But its founder, Dr. Charles Killick Millard, was a notorious supporter of eugenics.

As Mr. Fraser writes: “Today we are – rightly – repelled by the notion that the human race can be ‘improved’ by eliminating the weak, sick, or disabled.”

Mr. Fraser concludes that it would be far better to “provide improved, better-funded palliative care”.

SPUC’s Mr. Robinson said: “Assisted suicide is not medicine but a turning away from life, towards death, in response to the challenge of care.

“The killing of a patient should never be the answer.”

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