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Assisted dying was supposed to be a matter of helping those with hours, days or weeks to live to die at a time of their choosing with dignity and a degree of certainly about the actual death itself. It was about providing autonomy to those whose decline might bring them to the point where they physically couldn’t follow through on their own plan to control their exit.

I am a quibbler. I do not believe that the working paper lays the framework for the kind of eugenics that the most hysterical critics always complain about but I do believe it goes too far. My objection to Ottawa’s framework for end of life centres on the critical difference between death and suicide. I have always seen assisted dying as the acceleration of a death that is already happening. What I fear is that we have leapfrogged over that notion to the state helping otherwise healthy people to end their lives simply because they cannot bring themselves to do it themselves. I don’t want to be brutish, but if one simply cannot abide life there are means to end it. The fact that some people find life to be unbearable is not an argument for why the state has to kill them.

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I have worries about the notion of preauthorizing ones death for a time when they are no longer in control of their faculties. I am mindful of the fact that death from Alzheimer’s may be a living hell but none of us can know for sure. Long before they reach that point, the average person would probably say they would no longer wish to live should they arrive at the point where they soil themselves. But I can never shake off a scene in the memoir Tuesdays with Morrie where Morrie Schwartz tells Mitch Albom that he takes a certain pleasure in being coddled like a baby.