Professor Deirdre Madden:

I thank the Deputy for the question. Something that occurred to me as he was speaking is the whole issue of voluntariness, which is crucial to giving informed consent for any medical procedure, and is something that medical practitioners who seek informed consent before performing, say, a surgical intervention, need to be conscious of. The issue of pressure and its opposite, the question of voluntariness, is not unique to the question of assisted dying.

On the kinds of pressures experienced, as my colleague, Professor Donnelly, has said, they could be financial pressures, family pressures or societal pressures. I do not have a concrete example, but one can anticipate or imagine how that might occur. The point is that it is not unique to assisted dying. Any decision in the medical context has to be voluntary and not subject to undue pressure. The way that we can deal with that is through appropriate expertise of medical practitioners, through their training and education, and through knowledge of what to look out for and what kinds of discussions to have with people who seek to make these kinds of choices of about end-of-life care. It is about trying to ensure, as much as possible, that their decisions are not subject to any pressure. There are safeguards in other jurisdictions that include having independent assessments and evaluations. Safeguards could be built in, such as having social work, psychiatric, psychological assessments to make sure, as much as possible, that the person is reaching a free, informed, voluntary decision. That is the best kind of safeguard we could have for that. As I said, it is not unique to this context.