Article content continued

In Oregon, for example, where assisted suicide has been legal for almost 20 years, and which is often touted as a model because criteria have remained stable, people with depression and anxiety disorders seeking death are supposed to be weeded out. But, as Dr. William L. Toffler, national director of Physicians for Compassionate Care, points out in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, “some doctors see suicide as a solution to suffering and depression as rational given patients’ circumstances.” As a result, only three of the 105 patients who died under the law in 2014 were referred for a psychological exam. A 2008 study examining Oregonians who sought information on assisted suicide, published in the British Medical Journal, concluded that Oregon’s law “may not adequately protect all mentally ill patients.”

Common patterns in all jurisdictions in Europe that allow euthanasia or assisted suicide show increasing numbers over time, and a shift from a focus on terminal cancer to other diseases

`

Assisted dying is rapidly acquiring the aura of a “right” that all enlightened and progressive-minded people should naturally embrace. We resist that idea. People have a right to excellent medical care. They have a right to as pain-free a death as humanly possible. We would argue that every Canadian who needs it has a right to palliative care and a hospice bed if it is needed for a good death. But there is no inherent right to demand the state end your life for you, whatever the Supreme Court’s efforts to discern one in the Constitution’s invisible ink.

Polls and surveys indicating rising support for end-of-life autonomy seem to reinforce the inevitability of a societal shift. But that is because people are judging hypothetical, abstract scenarios, and because the options are presented in stark terms of “compassion” on the one hand and the prolongation of intolerable suffering on the other, a false choice.

Many people are not aware that very ill patients are already empowered to reject further medical treatment, and already have the right to a medicalized twilight state in the late stages of terminal disease, which hastens the dying process. This legal practice in easing the passage to death may seem very much like euthanasia. But it isn’t. Because, unlike the ground under Quebec’s Bill 52, it is not slippery and it is not on a slope.

National Post