I wonder whether the member sees the problems that many of us have with regard to money for palliative care being moved aside if this bill is passed. That is deeply difficult for many of us to understand. Not having proper palliative care would, I feel, be a form of coercion with regard to assisted dying.

I raised the issue in Parliament the other day, after you wrote to the committee before the stage 3 debate saying that there was no extra funding and that the funding would have to come from within the existing national health budget. Can you confirm that that remains the case and what your estimate would be of the costing?

What I am trying to get my brain around is that we voted for an earlier amendment that means that the medical professional has to sit with the patient until the patient has died, and I am still not clear about what happens when things do not work out as anticipated after they take the drugs. That can happen for a variety of reasons.

What is that medical professional supposed to do? Are they supposed to sit on their hands, do nothing, wait to see whether the drugs work and let that person go through the most appalling pain and suffering, or are they supposed to do something? No one has given me the answer, and I am not sure whether the member knows the answer or whether she feels that I have missed something when I have been listening.

This is only the second time that I have spoken in the debate, and I have lodged no stage 3 amendments, which is unusual for me.

This part of the bill troubles me more than most parts of it do. When is it appropriate to raise the issue of assisted dying? I do not support the bill, but, if it passes, we must ensure that the issue is raised at the right moment.

Let me be clear. I know that, when you get an adverse diagnosis, you are at your lowest ebb. Invariably, you have not listened to what you have been told, so you are reliant on members of your family to have listened with you. You do not have access to doctors and nurses afterwards. It might take you three or four weeks to get used to the diagnosis and to understand what it means. At that stage, you look for treatment options, and it is those treatment options that give you the confidence to go forward. Therefore, that is not the time—it never will be the time—to raise the issue of assisted dying.

The question is how we can legislate for that. Every time you go into hospital—I have been in a few recently—you are told about all the risks that you will face. You are told, “You could get a blood clot,” “You could get this,” or, “You could get that.” You are given options. I did not want, at that stage, to be given assisted dying as one of my options. Actually, it would not have been relevant to me, but if it had been relevant, I would not have wanted to have been given that option.

I think back to my mother, who died with breast cancer. It took six months for her to die. She did not want to approach death. She wanted to live. She would not have wanted a doctor to have raised with her the option of assisted dying at any stage during those six months. However, on her final day, when she knew that she was not going to go any further, she asked the doctor what the prognosis was. It was right that the doctor told her, and it would have been right, if the bill had been passed, for the doctor to have given her options. However, that is such a difficult thing to do.

I do not envy members making this decision, but we should be very careful to ensure that, when we decide when the right time is for a doctor to tell a patient about their options, it is the right time for the patient, not the right time for the bill, for the doctor or for anyone else. We cannot remove hope from the patient when we do that.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. My voting app would not connect. Bizarrely enough, I would have abstained.

Members: Ooh!

This is a difficult problem for the Parliamentary Bureau to wrestle with. I will not be clever and try to suggest all sorts of answers. However, one thing that is clear to me from my short time—10 years—in the Parliament is that, when we sit late towards midnight, we tend not to give legislation the due care and attention that we should be giving it. Does Jackie Baillie agree that, although Friday might not be the perfect solution, nor is sitting until 12 o’clock at night?

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. Unfortunately, I pressed the wrong button. I voted no when I should have abstained. I know that I cannot change my vote, but I would like to put that on the record.

Mortalities.

With respect, cabinet secretary, if 25 per cent of my cows died every year, I would be out of business, and I would not want to continue, because I would be sickened by it. I leave it at that.

I remind committee members and members of the public that my entry in the register of members’ interests shows that I am a joint owner of a wild salmon fishery on the River Spey. The River Spey is on the east coast of Scotland and is not directly affected by salmon farming on the west coast of Scotland.