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:Yay Canada!

[BarbaraHudson]

It's got to be better than forcing people to continue to live an unbearable life. If you were to do that to a dog, you'd be charged with cruelty, but ending a human's suffering in a dignified fashion? "Oh noes!!" The people who are against assisted suicide need to stop trying to impose their religious or other beliefs on others, same as same-sex marriage. When their time comes, they're free to tough it out til the bitter end, but I suspect that some of them will change their minds.

The Black Pill

[rmdingler]

With the erosion of religion and its accompanying objections to ending one's own life in most Western Nations (not including the U.S. unfortunately), I would expect to see more options for patients now facing only palliative care.

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).

Re:The Black Pill

[thegarbz]

What is assistance? Asking advice on the most painless, quick and reliable way of doing something?

If you're a wheel chair bound quadriplegic what is the option for suicide?
If you're a 100 year old senile man who can't remember if he's wearing pants what are your options for suicide?

If you're able bodied enough to actually do the work, how do you do it reliably? Carbon monoxide poisoning works well providing you have a garage and no noisy neighbours but every chance is you may wake up in hospital after some Good Samaritan saved you. Do you jump of a bridge and risk not having an instant death and instead dye in agony? Or maybe swallow every pill you find and end up with an agonizing death as your organs slowly fail? Heck there are people who have bitten the bullet and survived with half their brain missing.

Suicide and professionally assisted suicide are not the same thing. If you're lucky enough to have the option of one, it doesn't negate the need for the other.

Re:The Black Pill

[AchilleTalon]

So, end your days when you are still capable to decide. Opening the door to let someone decide for you because you have lost this capability and you believe today these individuals should be terminated is not the way to do it. You believe you have a right to decide. Yes, of course as long as you are capable to decide. Beside that, no one has the right to kill someone else, be he a doctor (m.d.).

Giving a de facto authorisation to doctors to terminate life when someone is incapable to decide is opening the door wide to abuse by the doctors and by the government itself. In case you are not aware, the healthcare in Canada is paid by the government acting as an insurer, when times are hard, the temptation is high to end the life of many who are costing to the treasury even if they paid tax their whole life to have access to this healthcare when growing old.

Re:The Black Pill

[Nemyst]

Medical oversight also ensures, as much as possible, that there are no treatments remaining that may be able to recover sufficient quality of life to avert the need for suicide. If the go-to response to suicidal tendencies was to go see a doctor for support, we may see a sharp decline in mental health-related suicides.

Re:The Black Pill

[Minupla]

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

Re:The Black Pill

[bmo]

So, end your days when you are still capable to decide. Opening the door to let someone decide for you because you have lost this capability and you believe today these individuals should be terminated is not the way to do it. You believe you have a right to decide. Yes, of course as long as you are capable to decide. Beside that, no one has the right to kill someone else, be he a doctor (m.d.).

Oh please.

Durable Powers of Attorney for healthcare have been around for ages now, and they are crucial if you don't want to suffer stuffed with medical equipment that will only ensure that your life is as painful as possible for your remaining days or hours.

My SO was the DPoA for her ex. She got a phone call last October and said that Eric was in ICU and told me she was his DPoA. His mental state had changed and he was no longer "there" to make decisions for himself. I could have been a dick and said "he's not your responsibility anymore" especially since there was an alternate. But no, I said "You do what you have to do. Do what's right by Eric."

He had gone in for chemotherapy. But then things started going badly very quickly and the healthcare professionals were putting out fires one after another. Eric had been intubated as an emergency measure because his body couldn't keep his airway open. He was also restrained to keep from semi-consciously reflexively trying to yank out the tubes. He was one of those people that stuff like that scared the shit out of him.

The intubation could have kept Eric alive indefinitely were it not for his entire body failing because of the cancer. Keeping him intubated was just delaying the inevitable.

So my SO helped him end his life by having him disconnected after his ex-wife (the alternate DPoA and still his best friend) flew in from upstate NY. Make no mistake, everyone knew that disconnecting him was killing him by many people's definitions and this required the approval of the nurse on duty, two doctors, and one of the DPoAs. He lived for hours after, so she stayed by his side, read poetry, and sang to him and said goodbye. Eric's greatest fear was that he would die in pain and alone tied to a machine (he didn't have any family here). Because he had someone to make the crucial decisions for him and be there for him, he didn't die that way.

I learned a few things over those days.

I learned that I needed my own DPoA, and I knew I found someone who would do the right thing if I needed it.

Assissted suicide would be similar. It wouldn't just be /one doctor/ alone making the decision for you if you were unable - it would be two doctors, and your DPoA at least. It would simply be an extension of existing DPoA laws.

And btw, your last thing: American insurance companies make the decisions to kill people every day by refusing to cover drugs or drag their feet covering valid treatments. So bringing up the "BIG SCARY CANADIAN GOVERNMENT IS GOING TO KILL YOU WHEN THEY HAVE A BUDGET SHORTFALL" is totally disingenuous, intellectually bankrupt, and stupid.

--
BMO

The problem

[Vintermann]

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.

Re:The problem

[Vintermann]

Such as system does not aim to answer the question if a life is worth living

If it tells some people that they are irrational in demanding to die (e.g saying they are depressed), and others that they are rational in demanding to die, then it implicitly does.

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".

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re:Slippery Slope

[ArcadeMan]

What's next? Legalization of marijuana?!!!

I sure hope not, for three reasons:

1. This shit really stinks, like burning old clothes which were stored in an attic for decades
2. People who are high usually listen to loud music, and it's annoying
3. We can only produce a limited quantity of snacks

Re:The General Attorney of Canada missed the point

[BarbaraHudson]

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.

Small business owners will oppose this in USA

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The small business owner is the job creator, one who takes enormous risk to put up some capital in the hopes of making insane amount of profits. There are people willing to do the work for 2$ an hour and bowl of refried beans, which is the price for labor set by Free Markets. But the onerous, oppressive and burdensome regulations thought up by the Federal bureaucrats are making them pay 7.50$ an hour several times what the Free market dictates. Further things like overtime pay, paid to wash hands after using restrooms, paid time to use restroom, costs like gloves and masks to handle chemicals....

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.

Re:Yay Canada!

[Nemyst]

How someone can twist the ability for a suffering human to request, of their own volition and under extensive medical supervision, assisted suicide, and turn it into a slippery slope fallacy of death camps and selective culling of the population is beyond me. There is just no connection outside of your ever so slightly deranged brain there.

Re:Yay Canada!

[BarbaraHudson]

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.