Andrew Coyne: Canada is making suicide a public service. Have we lost our way as a society?
Not only would doctors be permitted to kill their patients on request, they would be obliged to, or provide “effective referral” to others who will. And while the committee suggests that those seeking assistance in killing themselves should be required to get two doctors to certify they met the criteria, the criteria are so open-ended it is hard to see in what circumstances they could say no. In any event: the consent of two doctors? Where have we heard that before? What if none are available? How long could it be before the Supreme Court rules on the inequity of denying “access” on these grounds?
Indeed, no sooner had the report been released than advocates were pushing to expand its bounds. For example, should eligibility be restricted to “mature” minors? Could it, in law or conscience? As Dr. Derrick Smith, chair of the physicians’ advisory council of Dying with Dignity Canada, told the CBC, “obviously a five-year-old is not going to be able to give consent for something like that, but should we allow a substitute decision maker like the parent to say, ‘Johnny’s had enough suffering. I think it’s time that we assist him to terminate the suffering.’ ”
Well, of course. Once you have normalized suicide, from a tragedy we should seek to prevent to a release from suffering we should seek to assist, it is logically incoherent - indeed, it is morally intolerable - to restrict its benefits to some, while condemning others to suffer interminably, merely on the grounds that they are incapable of giving consent. So it is that assisted suicide has gone, in the space of a year, from a crime, to something to be tolerated in exceptional circumstances, to a public service. Perhaps you see this as progress. But I cannot help feeling that a society that can contemplate putting children to death has somehow lost its way...
Andrew Coyne: Canada is making suicide a public service. Have we lost our way as a society?
Indeed, no sooner had the report been released than advocates were pushing to expand its bounds. For example, should eligibility be restricted to “mature” minors? Could it, in law or conscience? As Dr. Derrick Smith, chair of the physicians’ advisory council of Dying with Dignity Canada, told the CBC, “obviously a five-year-old is not going to be able to give consent for something like that, but should we allow a substitute decision maker like the parent to say, ‘Johnny’s had enough suffering. I think it’s time that we assist him to terminate the suffering.’ ”
Well, of course. Once you have normalized suicide, from a tragedy we should seek to prevent to a release from suffering we should seek to assist, it is logically incoherent - indeed, it is morally intolerable - to restrict its benefits to some, while condemning others to suffer interminably, merely on the grounds that they are incapable of giving consent. So it is that assisted suicide has gone, in the space of a year, from a crime, to something to be tolerated in exceptional circumstances, to a public service. Perhaps you see this as progress. But I cannot help feeling that a society that can contemplate putting children to death has somehow lost its way...
Andrew Coyne: Canada is making suicide a public service. Have we lost our way as a society?