As with abortion buffer zones, there would be no limit to the number or size of assisted suicide buffer zones – the amendment would give ministers sweeping powers to create, vary, and extend these zones without any need for further debate.

If modelled on the abortion buffer zones, these new zones would cover places where assisted suicide was being carried out, along with extensive areas of public space around them. This could have absurd and dangerous consequences. It could become illegal for hospitals, GP surgeries, and other healthcare sites to display suicide prevention posters and leaflets, as these might well ‘influence’ someone who is there to seek assisted suicide. The amendment is also likely to have a chilling effect on conversations between patients and their doctors, and between patients and loved ones.

Under the bill, doctors would be tasked with assessing patients’ capacity and ensuring that a patient was not being pressured or coerced toward ending their lives. If it became an offence, within a GP surgery or hospital, to say or do anything that might influence a person’s decision about assisted suicide, it is easy to see how this could have a chilling effect on these vital conversations. Doctors would be forced to walk a hazardous line, always at risk of tipping into ‘influencing’.

Loved ones, too, could be at risk. A family member or friend accompanying a patient to an appointment would have to think twice before expressing any concern about the person’s wish to pursue assisted suicide. Reassuring someone that they were not a burden or that their family loved them and valued their life – very healthy, eminently relatable sentiments – might amount to ‘influence’ and trigger an investigation. If a family member simply became emotional, and their upset was likely to distress the patient, or influence them not to proceed with assisted suicide, might that too be an offence? Might chaplains be deterred from praying with patients considering assisted suicide? Harvie’s amendment, as it stands, does not exclude these bizarre and dystopian possibilities, but it also creates considerable potential for widespread interference with civil liberties.

Existing laws already criminalise harassment and breach of the peace in Scotland. Buffer zone laws target peaceful behaviour that amounts to neither of these things. Abortion buffer zone laws have been used elsewhere in the UK to arrest people for standing silently in the street. The Scottish buffer zone law was recently – and infamously – used to arrest an elderly woman for holding a sign reading “Coercion is a crime. Here to talk, only if you want.” Scottish government advice sent to residents living within ‘safe access zones’ warned that “activities in a private place (such as a house)…could be an offence if they can be seen or heard within the Zone.” The architect of the law, Gillian Mackay MSP, confirmed that the Scottish law might even criminalise citizens for praying in their own homes depending on “who is passing the window”.

The McArthur bill doesn’t rule out assisted suicide being provided in private homes. Might temporary buffer zones be created around homes too? How are members of the public to keep track of when they might be inside one of these zones?

The principle behind ‘safe access zones’ – as well as their reality – is authoritarianism cloaked in compassion. It might be tempting for those of us who would never consider using our civil liberties to pray silently outside an abortion clinic or assisted suicide facility to feel that nothing is lost when others are prevented from doing so. But once we begin turning a blind eye to unnecessary interference with civil liberties (unnecessary because existing law already covers the kind of conduct that is capable of causing actual, quantifiable harm) we have set a wheel in motion that will eventually crush the liberties we cherish. Yesterday, it was those who oppose abortion. Today, it is those who oppose assisted suicide (and there are many more of them). Tomorrow, who knows?

The most urgent threat posed by Harvie’s proposal is its propensity to undermine the state’s duty to protect life by pursuing suicide prevention strategies. The wider dangers are obvious, however. Holyrood voted overwhelmingly in favour of abortion buffer zones, and may well do the same this time, despite the significant threats posed by Harvie’s amendment. There is already a very real chance that if the McArthur bill becomes law, it will quickly be challenged in the courts as non-human rights compliant. Should it pass with buffer zones attached, this chance increases exponentially.

Dr Mary Neal is a reader in law at the University of Strathclyde