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Canadian Supreme Court Rules Ban On Assisted Suicide Unconstitutional
BarbaraHudson writes with word that Canada's Supreme Court has issued a strong statement in defense of Canadians' right to choose assisted suicide: [A] judgment, which is unsigned to reflect the unanimous institutional weight of the court, says the current ban on assisted suicide infringes on all three of the life, liberty and security of person provisions in Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It does not limit physician-assisted death to those suffering a terminal illness. The court agreed with the trial judge "that a permissive regime with properly designed and administered safeguards was capable of protecting vulnerable people from abuse and error. While there are risks, to be sure, a carefully designed and managed system is capable of adequately addressing them." Parliament has one year to enact new legislation modifying the Criminal Code to conform to the judgment.
First in..., death? Wait...
First they legalised same-sex marriage. Now they're proposing to allow terminally ill patients in suffering to end their lives with some dignity...
What's next? Legalization of marijuana?!!!
While this is very important news, without any doubt, why is it on Slashdot?
This is purely general/political news. There's no technological aspect to it. There's no scientific aspect to it. There's no mathematical aspect to it. It's just general news.
The whole point of me coming to Slashdot is to read and discuss tech/science/math/hardware/software news that the mainstream media doesn't cover because it isn't of general interest.
If I wanted to read and discuss general news like this, I'd go to the web sites of CNN, MSNBC, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Reuters, FOX News, or Sky News, or any number of other web sites devoted to such coverage.
I know this sort of off-topic, general news is posted to the front page here at Slashdot because it's controversial and it'll likely generate activity that results in some ad views. But let's try to maintain some minimal level of quality here, Slashdot editors, and only put relevant submissions on the front page, okay?
If anyone here wants to know what other Slashdot readers think about this matter, go discuss it on one of the many other general interest news web sites that exist. This site should focus on news that directly relates to technology, mathematics, and science.
When I have no more good days left, and every waking moment is agony or drug-induced, drooling stupor, I would like the option to give these borrowed molecules back to the universe when I am ready...not after my suffering has been prolonged by pointless medical procedure(s).
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
So, a carefully designed and managed system is capable of determining whether your life is not worth living? Presumably they will also find that some people are wrong in wanting to die, otherwise they wouldn't need a system at all.
Which lives are worth living or not sounds to me like the kind of question it's maybe not right to set an official answer to.
I have sympathy with people who feel life isn't worth living. But I wish they would not demand that others validate their choice by killing them.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I believe the General Attorney of Canada missed the point in this case and did not defend properly his position. If you can easily think anyone has the right to decide for his own life, the point is about asking someone else to kill him. The argument revolved around the right for an individual to put an end to his days, and this has been declared unconstitutional to force him to live. However, what about giving permission to someone to kill someone else? This is the entire point at my humble opinion and this is where there will be abuses. It will become very hard to sue someone who have killed someone else in the conditions described by the Court to prove the killed one has never asked to be killed.
Achille Talon
Hop!
What provisions are there for Life Insurance claims due to an assisted suicide?
Killing a baby is not murder, killing the old and feeble is not murder, but killing a murder is?
It would now be legal to go into business in Canada making suicide booths?
Those who would be best suited for assisted suicide would be those who are least able to properly consent to it. You could use a living will, but then what do you do if people change their minds? And what do you do about the sort of person who thinks they want to die but decided that irrationally and you expect would change their minds between jumping off a building and hitting the floor?
Also, given that for most suicide "attempts" the objective is to get people's attention rather than to die, what happens to all those if assisted suicide becomes legal?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
If I do my math right, in Switzerland the suicide rate is 14 in 100k * 7.8mio people = 1100/year. According to the statistics (PDF) from Dignitas they assist ~10 Swiss nationals/year. What does this mean? That 99% of suicides are unassisted - or at least without official assistance. Almost everybody could find a way to kill themselves. It could be messy, it could be painful, it could fail - one of the people in Terry Pratchet's "Choosing to die" had two failed suicide attempts behind him. The worst are those who end up endangering and causing psychological trauma for others by for example head-on collision with a big truck. These are not your "spur of the moment" suicides, those people are already dead.
You can refuse to get intravenous feeding and slowly and painfully starve to death. You can not get a concoction of drugs to quickly and painlessly end it. How is that merciful? Nobody would blame the gun shop if they sold you a gun you used to blow your own brains out. I realize why you would want "death pills" administered only in controllled conditions though, but then the flip side is you know what it's going to be used for. I understand that's an ethical problem to some even though they don't "pull the trigger", metaphorically speaking.
It's more my life than anybody else's. It's not for you to say if I want to live or not, of course you can advice and suggest but ultimately it is my decision. But then there I'm at odds with many other rules of society that seek to overrule my own opinion and say no, you can't do that for your own good. I poison my body with alcohol on a regular basis, nobody can objectively say it's good for my health. Not to mention addictive, though I'm hardly in the danger zone for alcoholism but of course all alcoholics started out drinking. And it lowers inhibitions for better and worse, I've never been closer to a criminal record than while drunk. Those are all risks I choose to accept. But with a lot of other drugs I'm overruled. If I want to die the healthcare system will overrule me, no I don't. I absolutely hate it when someone claims to know me better than myself.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I am sick of idiots who think they have a right to interfere in the lives of others.
Of course the US is full of such idiots, and I am most of the time embarrassed that
I share a country with such scum.
I'm curious
Sentenced to life, forever! Assisted suicide is illegal because it is of no benefit to the state, though it could be, for certain TLAs that are into that kind of thing. But there is a strong vested interest (a religious fervor) amongst our sociopathic rulers and their wannabe followers in seeing people suffer, the longer the better.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Now this, if these people decide this life is not worth living and decide to kick the bucket legally, without any consequence, what would happen to their businesses? Who would create jobs? Nothing should put the well being and motivation of the small business owner to risk. The access to steady supply of cheap labor and over supply of laborers should be maintained by the government at all costs. Allowing legal suicides would imperil the most sacrosanct class of Americans, the small business owner.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There is a really good iq2 debate about this http://intelligencesquaredus.o...
Cures for diseases and repairs should come first. While there are some unbelievably horrendous diseases out there that at present time we cannot cure. An example of this is one of the worst Cancers you can get, Transitional cell Carcinoma, which we wage an endless struggle even slowing down it moves so radically fast. That doesn't meanwe shouldn't keep looking for cures where ever is possible.
If you're a wheel chair bound quadriplegic we should be looking for a way to repair, regrow, or use a cybernetic augment your spinal column where you can move again. If you're a 100 year old senile man who can't remember if he's wearing pants then we should find a way to re-grow the failed Glial cells in your brain causing you to have de-reference failures in your brain making you unable to remember that you are not wearing any pants.
And while the Judeo/Christian/Islamic god may not exist in reality he exists in the minds of those that believe in him, and that god profits from our agony and misery. The best way to defeat that god's will, is to create conditions where Humans live healthy comfortable lives. Humans that are healthy, content, and have a high standard of living and education will not turn to "God" for help and will not be controlled as such.
Canada has a constitution?
... while cancer ate away at his brain, while he was in pain, while our entire family could do nothing but witness him die over the period of two months, I can say that every single person of any love whatsoever would happily euthanize another human being going through that suffering.
Of course, it does not — they (along with Australia and a few others) are ruled by the British Crown. They have something, that's called "Constitution of Canada" — except it is the other way around. Whereas American Constitution was the supreme law first, and other laws were written to cover areas not covered by the document and tested not to violate it, Canada's imitation is "an amalgamation of codified acts and uncodified traditions [emphasis mine -mi] and conventions".
The worst difference, in my opinion, is that Canadian "Constitution" is easier to amend, than American, and is thus more prone to temporary opinion-swings.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Three things: (1) Because I agree with paragraphs 1 and 2, I think the ruling is bad because it will give People an excuse to say, "Well, We can't cure it and They can just die. So, why bother trying to cure the disease." (2) Your characterization of the J/C/I Deity ignores the fact said Deity actually profits from the alleviation of agony and misery and not the agony/misery, per se; therefore, trying to "defeat that god's will" should not be a goal. (3) Eliminating disease will not remove the Human need for a Deity.
While my migraines aren't making me suicidal, they do give me a lot of sympathy for people who are suffering from more debilitating and painful conditions in the later years of their lives. I can easily imagine a life that is so miserable that I'd want to end it on my terms instead of prolonging it.
I don't want to live much past 65-70 (I'll be 51 in April.) The idea of spending years in a nursing home eating shit for food, bored to tears, and listening to my neighbour tell me for the 40th time about their grandkids visiting last weekend is the most horrific existence I can imagine. So around 60, I'll be filing a "do not resuscitate" order with the local health care system.
I cannot fathom people who go to extreme lengths of diet and exercise in a futile effort to prolong their lives. No one lives forever. You will die, no matter what you do to put it off. Why would you want to exist in suffering for extra years instead of just accepting your exit gracefully while you're still a fully functioning human being?
Aneurism. Heart attack. Hit by a bus. I can't say that I really care how I go -- so long as I don't have to spend those gruel-eating years waiting to stop existing in some horrible nursing home.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
... Physicians cannot be required to assist. That would be a much bigger problem: state-ordered murder by the public. Ick.
I knew that for at least a week now. Old news.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
that encourages a sociopathic focus on what one wants reqardless of a wider social good. And the right to commit suicide will inevitably become the obligation to do so.
E Proelio Veritas.
I see you have an opinion there, sir. I'm glad you are able to pronounce it publicly. Others have differing opinions on the matter, like myself.
I believe everyone and anyone should be free to do as they please so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.
The production, ownership, and use of marijuana does not infringe upon anyone's rights.
I do not believe in assisting individual suicide, the only exception would be politicians.
I agree with this decision but I don't think Doctors should be the ones doing the killing. They take an oath to do no harm. Instead there should be another person, for example, some with a "B.Sc in Death" that actually does the job.
Why to use the word suicide? This is nor a suicide nor an assisted suicide. The word is Euthanasia. Is that some bigot propaganda?
A doctor is going to tell you to drink Drano for an ulcer before he prescribes suicide as a treatment for depression. So stuff the fearmongering BS.
You are such a fucking dumass[sic].
I find this troubling, not because I disagree with a policy of permitting assisted suicide - it's a tricky issue and I accept that there's no perfect solution - but because far too often 'unconstitutional' is a thinly disguised version of 'something the Supreme Court disagrees with politically'.
This is a political matter for Parliament, not a question of law that needed clarification. It would be nice if our politicians were not so lazy and cowardly that they decline to deal with the issue, but that does not mean it's a good idea for the judicial branch to start legislating for them. Even if you think judicial activism is a good idea - and not everyone does - it can be taken too far.
Since people who refuse to marry same-sex couples can be fired, surely the government will fire any doctor who refuses to kill his or her patient. What could possibly go wrong?
Haven't read the decision, but such was my concern.
Usually it involves some determination of "Competency" which can be somewhat hard to define. In many cases legally this may be influenced by undue "Duress". Which in many of the cases due to the nature of the issue, both are at risk. As the injury or affliction may rob someone of their faculties, and being in a lot of pain could certainly be called duress. If so, the number of incidents this would actually cover might actually be quite small.
It may sound selfish, but I know I would not want to have to make such a decision for a loved family member, and if it isn't an option, then that decision is taken out of your hands. I know the only two examples of this I can recall (because they were in the media), were parents of a mentally challenged girl, and an older woman suffering from dementia, neither of which would likely pass the competency test anyway.
Then the difficulty becomes in diagnosis. About the only time this might apply is someone that gets early diagnosis of something really bad, and decides that they do not want to live through the experience. That said, just like the argument against capitol punishment, judges and the court system are not infallible, and neither are doctors or our medical system. Though presumably, one would proceed though the initial stages prior to any decision of this magnitude being made, however given the limits, if you wait too long... may no longer be allowable.
One problem that I hear about when this issue comes up is that some greedy relative will convince the patient to off himself so they can get their money. My solution to that is to cut the relative out of my will before authorizing him to make the decision for me. What could go wrong?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2...
Why did I post this? Ask me now!