Recent coverage of the assisted-suicide case to be heard by the B.C. Court of Appeals in March represents it as a struggle between valiant grassroots human-rights crusaders pushing for the right to assisted suicide and a reactionary, insensitive federal government without any moral weight behind its position.
The truth is otherwise: Those seeking assisted suicide could better be characterized as a small, legalistic and atheistic elite, while those opposing it are a broad-based coalition of grassroots disabilities groups, religious organizations and pro-life groups.
Those with disabilities say they have good reason to fear assisted suicide, both for its specific dangers and for the direction it would move Canadian culture. The disabled already experience our culture as one that is often hostile toward their existence. They also experience the resentment and impatience of their family members (and heirs). They believe the law against assisted suicide protects them from the “assistance” of people and institutions with vested interests in their deaths.
As Tony Dolan, chairman of the Council for Canadians with Disabilities, recently put it while appealing for funds to intervene in the upcoming appeal: “Rather than being singled out as the only group deserving physician-assisted suicide, we need to know people want us alive, not dead. We are people with disabilities. We are moms and dads, students and teachers, workers and unemployed, young and old, and leaders and active citizens in our communities. We want help to live our lives, not end them.”
Not just the disabled, but the elderly, have reason to fear this bill, says medical doctor Will Johnston, also president of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of B.C. He relates on the EPC-BC website a case in which family members forced their aging mother to sell her home and move into a prison-like institution, and another case where the next of kin denied their father proper care until he needed hospitalization, whereupon they informed medical staff: “He’s had a good life. He wouldn’t want any treatment.” All he needed was fluids, as it turned out, and he was soon discharged.
Johnston fears that, if assisted suicide were permitted, it would next become a legal obligation for hospitals and doctors to offer it.
“Some patients will experience even the most perfunctory acknowledgment of assisted suicide as an inducement to it,” says Johnston. “If state-sanctioned suicide becomes part of the atmosphere in our hospitals, a presumption in that direction will be created. I predict the same erosion of medical diligence that many of us on the front lines have already watched happen when caregivers choose to see a patient as having finished all useful life.”
Those who want assisted suicide for themselves fear the loss of autonomy and of “quality of life” that extreme infirmity would bring. But this tends to equate value of life with quality of life, precisely what disabled people fear, since they already experience society’s judgment that their lives are not worth living, that they would be “better off dead.”
That is why disabled people in Canada and around the world have formed groups specifically to oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide, usually under the name “Not Dead Yet.”
Steve Weatherbe is president of Choose Life Victoria.
