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.

Comments

Re:The problem

[Attila Dimedici]

Maybe you should look at places that have already implemented such systems. 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. They just use their own judgment as to whether that person's life is still worth living. As far as I have been able to find, there have been no prosecutions for such acts, even though they are technically illegal. In other words, once it becomes legal for medical professionals to assist someone in taking their own life, medical professionals begin killing people who have not asked for such "help".