It’s hard to look at matters such as assisted suicide with objectively. This topic is sensitive to many people and the decision whether or not to allow it in Canada is definitely a tough one. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled those with grievous and irremediable medical conditions have the right to ask a doctor to help them die.
People need to realize the implications of this. The ruling does not mean that doctors will be compelled to kill anyone. It doesn’t apply to children or teenagers. It doesn’t mean that doctors who are morally or religiously opposed to assisted suicide will be forced to do it if a patient asks. It simply grants individuals who are facing severe and intolerable suffering a right to choose to end their lives. This prevents the alternative options: dying by suicide, often by violent and dangerous methods, or suffering immensely until they die of natural causes.
Everyone should be entitled to live and die by their own means if they can.
A person suffering from diseases such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is often faced with a bleak future. As unfortunate and sad as this is, it is the reality. Patients with chronic, painful illnesses experience months, even years of suffering and pain, basically living a slow and eventual death. This not only affects the person suffering, but their friends and family as well, who have to watch them in constant unendurable pain.
Carleton student Miguel Ramos sums it up nicely: “Physician-assisted death isn’t a privilege, it’s a basic human right. The Supreme Court’s ruling will finally let those who wake up each and every day with unbearable suffering—both physical and mental—to end their life on their own terms. Even though people our age may not fully appreciate the gravity of this decision right now, I know they will later on. We’ll be the first generation with full control of our lives. It won’t be a debilitating condition that dictates our last act, it’ll be us. And that’s how it should be.”
When discussing this topic, I can’t help but recall the movie Million Dollar Baby, where the main character, Maggie, suffers a punch in a boxing match that ends up breaking her neck, and paralyzing her for life. She also eventually has her leg amputated. She no longer wants to live like that. She’s had her successful boxing career and wants to die remembering the crowd cheering her name, not the suffering she is in. She ends up biting her own tongue, hoping to bleed to death, although unsuccessfully. In the end, her mentor and boxing coach finally gives in to her wishes, and pulls out her breathing tube. She dies with a smile on her face.
Although it’s only a movie, cases like this aren’t uncommon. Kay Carter, a Canadian woman diagnosed with a degenerative spinal cord condition, travelled to Switzerland in 2010 to take her own life. Switzerland is the only country that allows foreigners to travel there for this purpose. Carter recognized the steady decline of her body and said in a letter to her friends and family, “as my health deteriorated, I witnessed friends whose body had totally collapsed. [I] did not want to follow their path.”
There’s also the case of Brittany Maynard, an American woman with terminal brain cancer who also decided she would die on her own terms. Given only six months left to live, she moved to Oregon, to take advantage of the state’s Death with Dignity Law. She ended her own life in November of last year, surrounded by her loved ones, the way she wanted.
The truth is, we will all die. But advancements in modern medicine have put remedies of illnesses and the reduction of suffering at our disposal. At the same time, however, they have given us the power to sustain life—while prolonging death—of patients whose physical and mental capacities cannot be restored. Their conditions cannot be improved. Their pain cannot be eliminated. So why are we allowing perverse extension of death rather than helping those with hope of a better future?
In the end, these decisions should be left up to the doctors, the patients, and their families, not politicians and legislators. The Supreme Court did not condemn terminally ill people to die. They simply gave them the right to make their own decision.
