Assisted Suicide In Canada

Assisted Suicide In Canada, Each Friday, Yahoo! Canada News asks Canadians where they stand on the important issues of the day, and our panel of experts tackles the same question.

Ottawa continues to fight a B.C. Supreme Court decision allowing terminally ill people to end their lives with the help of a doctor. Do you think doctor-assisted suicide should be legal in Canada?

Thomas Bink: Tough one and kinda grim, too. The way I see it is that every individual has the right to decide how or when they want to die. If they’ve made peace with themselves and their families and they’d rather die than suffer from a debilitating ailment, they have every right to make that decision. It definitely gets trickier when a person’s state of mind is in question. And as for doctors? Well, I think they have a right to decide if they want to participate in the process, too. I understand the debate. But we live in a free country, and part of that freedom should include how we want to die.

Matthew Coutts: Suicide should never be taken lightly, even doctor-assisted suicide. But do I believe there are times when the more humane thing to do is accept a terminally-ill person’s desire to die and pull the metaphorical plug? Yes, I absolutely do. I would recommend any patient in their right mind consider every option, seek out every shred of help, before considering suicide. But when the end is inevitable and the journey there painful, I understand how that decision could be made. I feel for the doctors who have to make the decision about whether or not to participate. It must go against their nature to end a life, rather than save it, and I wonder what feelings those people are left with. But they are also in the best position to make the call. They know their patient’s state of mind, they have seen before where the journey ends. I think we lean on them in times like those.

Andy Radia: This is a tough question. On the one hand, if I was ever diagnosed with a terminal illness I would want the choice to end my life if it became unbearable to live. But having said that, I think legalizing euthanasia would be the beginnings of slippery slope to legalizing suicide. If we were to legalize we would need checks and balances – but is there really any way to effectively regulate it? How do we know the person making the decision is really in a sound state of mind? How do we know that the patient isn’t being pressured or manipulated to end their life? I’m sorry guys, I’m really on the fence on this one.

Bink: Right, I guess it’s the intangibles that make this such a grey-area issue, and why the federal government continues its fight it through the B.C. Supreme Court. We’re always raising red-flags about mental illness when a suicide occurs how are we to understand the state of mind of a long-suffering patient? It is difficult. But I still believe in the right of the individual to make his or her own choices – and this is one of those things that should stay between a patient, his doctor and God. I think it’s a discussion between patient and doctor, and governments or courts have no place there.

Assisted Suicide In Canada

Assisted Suicide In Canada, Canada’s laws prohibiting assisted suicide are once again being challenged in court in a landmark case that began this week.

Five plaintiffs, including a 63-year-old woman suffering from a fatal neurodegenerative disease and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, have filed a claim against Canada in the province’s Supreme Court, arguing that the current laws prohibiting assisted suicide for seriously and incurably ill patients are unconstitutional.

Lee Carter and Hollis Johnson, two of the plaintiffs who helped Carter’s ill mother, diagnosed with spinal stenosis, travel to a clinic in Switzerland to perform physician-assisted suicide, will also be providing evidence in the case. The couple wants to avoid the risk of being prosecuted under the current laws in Canada.

Groups opposed to legalization of euthanasia have been mobilizing their efforts to keep the laws unchanged. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC), which has intervenor standing in the case, is calling legalization of assisted suicide “a recipe for elder abuse and a threat to individual patients’ rights.”

“I see elder abuse in my practice, often perpetrated by family members and caregivers. A desire for money or an inheritance is typical,” Will Johnston, a Vancouver physician and chair of the British Columbia chapter of EPC, said in a statement.