Threat of charges dropped against suicide GP
A retired doctor from Glasgow who gave advice to a woman trying to kill herself has said she stands by her actions, after it was decided that no charges would be brought against her.
A statement issued by the Crown Prosecution Service yesterday said that prosecuting Dr Libby Wilson, 84, for assisting a suicide. was not in the public interest, although there was sufficient evidence to do so.
Dr Wilson was arrested by Surrey police in September last year, four months after the suicide of 43-year-old Woking academic Cari Loder, who was terminally ill with multiple sclerosis.
Telephone records revealed Ms Loder had contacted Dr Wilson twice in the days immediately before her death on June 8, 2009.
Questioned by police, Dr Wilson, who founded the right-to-die campaign group Friends at the End (Fate) in 2000, admitted advising Ms Loder on how to kill herself by administering helium gas.
A bail hearing she was due to attend on Friday has now been cancelled. Nor will charges be brought against two men, from England, who were also arrested in connection with Ms Loder’s suicide.
The statement from the CPS concluded: “When considering the public interest we have balanced the factors tending in favour and against a prosecution. In this case the woman was 83 years old and the assistance she provided was minimal, in that she gave some advice. Ms Loder had plainly intended to commit suicide, and there is no evidence that the advice given contributed significantly to the outcome.”
Speaking to The Herald yesterday, Dr Wilson, a grandmother of 16, said she had “not modified her views” on assisted suicide in light of her experience.
She said she had anticipated potential prosecution at the time of speaking to Ms Loder.
She said: “You are aware that somebody might take some action, but you either have your principles or you don’t.”
She also said that such conversations were not unusual with people who contacted her through the Fate website.
Ms Loder contacted Dr Wilson after having already failed to kill herself with an overdose, and wanted medical advice after obtaining a helium canister over the internet that would enable her to end her life by cutting off the oxygen supply to her brain.
Dr Wilson said: “She phoned me because she wanted a bit more information about how exactly she was to set about it. But she already had the apparatus that was necessary and she really just wanted reassurance. She told me what she proposed to do, and I was just able to say ‘yes, do that’.”
She believes her role as a high-profile figure in the right-to-die movement is the “logical conclusion” in a career that saw her at the forefront of the battle to legalise birth control. She has appeared alongside Cardinal Winning on television debates on contraception and spent the past 10 years before retirement running family planning services in Glasgow.
“The people who didn’t want people to have control over the start of life, are the same people who don’t want us to have control over it at the end,” she said.
She was also critical of the “waste of public money” spent investigating her case as well as the “enormous amount of paperwork” facing UK citizens attempting to get to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland in order to be legally assisted in their suicide.
But the decision not to prosecute was lambasted by right-to-life group, Care not Killing.
A spokesman said: “This marks a very worrying trend in the campaign by those to legalise assisted suicide because there appears to be a de facto legalisation of it if you are assisted by someone that is old, or if there is no evidence that there was any malicious intent.”
It also comes as a Scottish Parliament committee prepares to begin hearing evidence next month in relation to Margot MacDonald’s assisted suicide Bill, which advocates changing the law to support physician-assisted suicide.
Yesterday, the MSP, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, welcomed the decision not to prosecute Dr Wilson.
“I’m very glad that common sense has prevailed,” she said.
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