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

[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 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: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.

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.)