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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.
If the person has the right to end their life because it's not possible to help them and they want to end their suffering, and you deny them assistance when they are not physically capable of doing it themselves (just do a search for Sue Rodriguez), you have effectively removed the right for that person to end their life.
And that is unconstitutional in Canada.
And as the court noted, other jurisdictions have installed safeguards that work; there's no reason to believe and slippery slope will occur.
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.
The conditions that the court envisions would make what you describe impossible.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
when someone is incapable to decide
Just to point out - that was NOT the decision the court made. instead of paraphrasing I'll quote:
physicianâ'assisted death for a competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition.
Full judgement text available here
So the decision was not to allow doctors to make an arbitrary judgement on people who could not consent. The judgement was to prevent the government from finding doctors guilty of murder for respecting their patient's clearly expressed and competent wishes to end their lives only in circumstances of nonredeemable suffering.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Fortunately in Canada there's no insurance company to put pressure on people to off themselves. It's not an ideal world, but it's the one we've got, so we do our best.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Repeated studies have shown that in the Netherlands, where physician-assisted suicide has been legal for some time now, medical professionals report that they do not wait for the patient to decide that they want to die.
That is correct. Only you are conveniently forgetting that the frequency of that happening went down by a factor of 4 after euthanasia became legal in 2002. To quote from a peer-reviewed article in the Lancet: "Ending of life without an explicit patient request in 2010 occurred less often (0Ã2%; 95% CI 0Ã1Ã"0Ã3; 13 of 6861) than in 2005, 2001, 1995, and 1990 (0Ã8%; 0Ã6Ã"1Ã1; 45 of 5197). "
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61034-4/abstract
(And for those who are not used to reading responsible research that tries to report findings, instead of support a pre-determined position, CI refers to the confidence interval and is a measure of how certain the researchers are of their numbers. If you would like to point to other studies, don't bother if your study is not peer reviewed and does not include such basic means of determining the underlying statistics.)