The right to life and death
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By: Stephen Mantler
It’s been called a landmark case. And indeed, lifting the ban on assisted suicide should be a landmark case, one where individual rights override state authority. But I think if it truly is a landmark cause then it ought to be the last of its kind.
The fear that could have marked this case as unresolved was the potential for the ban to be lifted only for those with a terminal illness. The insufficiency here is that the blanket prohibition would only be pulling down its cover slightly when the blanket should be entirely stripped off the bed.
Putting it plainly, assisted suicide should be made available to all who seek it, regardless of a terminal illness. Well enough, the Supreme Court of Canada has avoided this shortcoming, setting the base on which Parliament can build constitutionally sound legislation.
The SCC specifically dodged this limitation in their second requisite for euthanasia seekers, whereby the patient must have a “grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstance of his or her condition.” This may seem oddly close to my former protest, only expanding the scope slightly, and I admit I would have favoured a softer lexicon, but, satisfactorily, Parliament now has the privilege to establish what constitutes these conditions. But something that must be acknowledged is that one does not need to have a medical condition to be in a grievous, intolerable state of suffering. Even better, one does not need to be suffering in order to have the will to commit suicide.
This perspective places great emphasis on individual autonomy. A person content with their passage to death should be able to pursue the dignified end that physician-assisted suicide offers solely on the account of their volition. To have it any other way is to deny the healthy suicide because they were not unfortunate enough to develop a crippling or insufferable medical condition.
If you are still unconvinced by this appeal to human decency then it should be tersely noted that some of the salient arguments voiced by the Supreme court do carry over to the complete emancipation of the suicidal. In S.7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees “the right to life, liberty, and security of the person,” the Court found that “life” is not just the preservation of life, which would create a coercive “duty to live,” but a right to life “during the passage to death.” Can it not be held that the healthy, along with the unhealthy, are equally entitled to waive their right to life?
Regarding “liberty,” the court determined that the prohibition wrongly “interferes with their ability to make decisions concerning their bodily integrity.” A medical condition is irrelevant to this interference. And concerning “security of the person,” it was argued that the prohibition wrongly leaves people to be consumed in their intolerable pain. Well, it is implicit that a suicidal person does not want to live, so forbidding any suicide is to make them live, until they resort to self-suicide, thereby still violating their security.
The right to a self-determined death is from the mere fact that you have life and that death is coming. The Courts have done an admirable job, but if you have any life in you, which I am sure you do, then join in the demand for legislation that tells you the obvious: that your life is your life. If not, it will only be time before the Courts have to settle this debate once and for all in what will then be the landmark case.
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