As a physically disabled person, my stomach churns to read that Margo MacDonald plans to "launch a new law to legalise assisted suicide in Scotland" (The Herald, October 31).

My own family is much affected by multiple sclerosis, as well as other severely debilitating conditions, and so I understand the fear people feel at the prospect of being unable to end what to them is unbearable suffering. I also think, however, that much more attention should be given to the ways in which people are socially negated in society just because they are perceived as having severe disability. This is somehow always reduced to lack of personal control and therefore to helplessness.

Why, for example, because of disability or a particular diagnosis, are "the disabled" invariably lumped into one of two categories, either "brave" or "tragic", when a great deal of the misery we experience could be greatly helped by people trying harder to understand and come to terms with our difficulties?

Part of the reason why others feel sorry for us, or speak in hushed tones when they speak to us, is because they know that society has powerful ways of excluding us - access to transport, an ordinary social life and community amenities being a few - so that in the end all we seem to have to look forward to is becoming an undignified burden to our relatives.

Seen as a financial burden to society, friends and family, it is sometimes assumed that it is better, therefore, for us to shuffle out of sight - and mind - before it gets too uncomfortable for the rest of you.

Living in fear of becoming so disabled themselves, it becomes easier for the public to abdicate the role of making life better for sick and disabled people by suggesting that their needs may indeed be best met by assisted suicide. Even with the so-called "safeguard" of making this only for the terminally ill, who decides what constitutes terminal: the severely depressed person, or perhaps the severely physically disabled client who costs society more money? Both pain and indignity respond well to human intervention and so shouldn't be used to justify the unjustifiable.

While Margo is, of course, right to encourage full and frank debate on this very sensitive issue, there is a very real danger that by focusing purely on the negative aspects of disability, without also sharing the real possibilities for social acceptance and change, there will be a return to the social eugenics of the early twentieth century and to the dark days when disabled people were "unfit for purpose" and so more easily disposed of by our society.

Now that many more people are living longer, thanks to Beveridge's NHS, it seems to me a great irony that we should now be making a case for others to end their lives in this way. However bad my disability gets, I want to be living when I die, and that depends on the rest of you being enlightened and prepared enough to take that on board.
Alison Morton-Cooper (Dr),
Castle Douglas,
Dumfries & Galloway.

Your leader (Medical opinion must be heard, October 31) is correct. The voices of individual doctors, especially GPs, would be interesting.

The trouble is that the views of ordinary members of the medical fraternity are seldom heard. Comments come from the headquarters of medical associations, mostly from non-doctors or doctors who no longer practise.

Even the Fitness to Practice panel, which reviews cases of doctors who may or may not have helped a terminal patient to die, often has only one doctor on it, and other members are often from a religious background that they feel forbids such help.

Let us hear more from ordinary GPs rather than from those who tell them what to do from a position of ignorance of the practical aspects of dying.
Alice Watson,
Friends at the End,
Glasgow.