The push for euthanasia could be the death of us all
by Hugh Anderson
Montreal Gazette, March 30, 2009
Source
Imagine carrying around with you at all times a sort of get-out-of-hospital-alive card, sometimes called a sanctuary card. Its message: I do not want to be killed even though my quality of life seems to you to be unbearable.
Hard to imagine? In Holland and Belgium right now such cards are in demand. They may become essential in the not too distant future for seniors in Quebec and other parts of Canada and the U.S. who do not want to die before their time because other people believe that killing you is in your best interest, or that you should be assisted to kill yourself.
A majority of voters in Washington state recently approved allowing doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of drugs on request, under certain conditions. The Death With Dignity Act that emerged is now law in the state. So Washington has become the second U.S. state to sanction assisted suicide, joining Oregon. Similar legislation is being advocated in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Mexico, Hawaii, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
In Canada, actively assisting somebody else to commit suicide remains a crime, punishable by up to 14 years in jail. A third attempt by Bloc Qubcois MP Francine Lalonde to move a private member's bill through Parliament is getting under way. Her previous bill would have legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide for people suffering from chronic physical or mental pain. Nor was it limited to terminal illness.
A Quebec jury recently refused to convict a young man for helping his uncle to commit suicide. The uncle had been disabled by poliomyelitis as a child and was confined to a wheelchair. His condition was not terminal, but he had badgered his nephew for a long time to help him die.
The Washington vote has changed things, warns Alex Schadenberg, head of Canada's Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. The idea had been turned down in earlier state votes. "I have a feeling that euthanasia and assisted suicide supporters believe they are on a roll," he says.
The strange thing is that we do have an ominous real-life or real-death demonstration of what this kind of thing can lead to. Holland legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide three decades ago, first in practice and later by law. Advocates said it would be limited to competent adults who are terminally ill and ask to be killed. Then it was extended to competent adults with incurable illnesses or disabilities, although not terminally ill. Then it was extended to competent adults who were depressed but otherwise not physically ill. Then it was extended to incompetent adult patients like Alzheimer's sufferers, on the basis that they would have asked for death if they were competent.
And now it is legal for doctors in Holland to kill infants, if parents agree, if they believe their patients' suffering is intolerable or incurable. This is a long way from the soothing image of an elderly person choosing with full understanding to die with dignity, assisted by compassionate relatives and friends.
Then there are such places as Dignitas, one of the Swiss assisted-suicide clinics. An investigation by a British newspaper found that those who could afford the high fee could fly in and be killed within an hour or two. A whistle-blowing former employee said she had seen new arrivals sharing the same elevator with gurneys removing the bodies of earlier arrivals.
Yes, but there are safeguards, advocates of assisted suicide and euthanasia argue. Indeed there are - on paper. Experience indicates that they are frail bulwarks against abuse, however, especially as health care systems struggle to cope with soaring demand and budget shortfalls.
Oregon health authorities have admitted that they have refused to pay for an expensive new drug while simultaneously offering the patient a cheaper alternative: physician-assisted suicide.
In Britain the recently appointed "voice of older people," Joan Bakewell, says Parliament should look again at a proposed law that would give doctors the legal right to prescribe a fatal dose of drugs to terminally ill patients. The 75-year-old also says she does not think elderly people, including herself, should be kept alive for as long as possible just because it has become possible, especially if they have become "a vegetable."