Big news from Canada via the Beeb –
Canada’s Supreme Court has ruled that doctors may help patients who have severe and incurable medical conditions to die, overturning a 1993 ban.
In a unanimous decision, the court said the law impinged on Canadians’ rights.
The case was brought by a civil rights group on behalf of two women, Kay Carter and Gloria Taylor, with degenerative diseases. Both have since died.
Wow. Eric MacDonald has been campaigning on this issue for years.
The government has to write a new law within a year or the law will be struck down.
Assisted suicide is legal in several European countries and a few US states.
In Canada is it illegal to counsel, aid or abet a suicide, and the offence carries up to 14 years in prison.
Which is why Eric got a visit from the police after he accompanied his wife Elizabeth to Zurich. They didn’t prosecute him though…but they could have. The worst is, she died earlier than she needed to because she was determined to do it while she still could.
In the ruling, the justices wrote they “did not agree that the existential formulation of the right to life requires an absolute prohibition on assistance in dying, or that individuals cannot ‘waive’ their right to life”.
The court limited doctor-assisted suicide to patients who are consenting adults, who have a incurable but not necessarily terminal disease that causes “enduring and intolerable suffering”.
Wo – that “not necessarily terminal” makes it an even bigger deal. There’s an issue with stipulating that the disease has to be terminal, given that some non-terminal diseases can be such misery.
The justices also argued the total ban on doctor-assisted suicide “deprives some individuals of life, as it has the effect of forcing some individuals to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable”.
Bingo. Exactly. That’s why Eric’s wife Elizabeth insisted on going to Zurich prematurely. The reality of the Oregon and Washington laws has been that fewer people than expected get doctor-assisted suicide: once it’s available, the urgency goes away.
This issue may be like abortion in the US: it may be better to have it decided by legislators than by courts. Then again it may be like segregation: it may be better to have the high court firmly strike down the underlying principle.
Some diseases can have long periods of suffering before killing (e.g. ALS, MS). That wording means some busybody might try to impose their will on someone who can’t defend themselves, try to claim a disease “isn’t terminal” because the person might live in a wheelchair unable to move for ten years. Solitary confinement in a prison is considered torture by many. Solitary confinement within your own body is no different. I’ve never felt suicidal, but the idea of being forced to suffer against my will reads like stories out of 1970s Chile or Argentina.
A quick look leaves me unsurprised. Those who oppose individual rights and the right to end life repeatedly bringing up Robert Latimer, a case which has nothing to do with consenting adults making their own decisions.
I know, that’s what I’m saying. The ruling said it doesn’t have to be terminal, so it’s even more of a win.
Living with depression makes me really nervous about this issue. The conditions in the ruling seem pretty clear, but I still hope that the doctors who decide medical ethics rules in Canada (for the US I would say the AMA or similar) put out and enforce some good rules on how this interacts with mental illness.
Of course, that’s part of the problem right there. The same thing happened with some of the prostitution laws a year or so ago… the replacement law pushed through by the current government is pretty much as bad as the old law in all the ways that are important, and the general consensus of the legal community I’ve heard is that it will get knocked over the moment it gets to a Supreme Court challenge. The current group of legislators aren’t the sorts of people I would want trying to make law on an issue like this.
Of course, when the original marriage laws got struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada for being discriminatory, Paul Martin was smart in that he basically pre-ran the proposed new legislation past the Supreme Court first, then came back and put it in front of Parliament. That made it easier to convince some of the fence-sitters, who were more concerned about not having to go through this again than about the actual details of the law. Of course, that isn’t something you can do very often.
Personally, I think this is the sort of thing that is really best done by the legislators… I just don’t trust the current set of legislators. And this is all complicated by the fact that the health system is officially provincial jurisdiction, not federal, and there are limits to just how far the federal government is willing to push on that. (Which is also why, as has been noted before, Canada’s abortion access is such a shoddy patchwork in places.)