A Way of Death?

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                                                 A WAY OF DEATH?     

                                                             by

                                                Kenneth Bagnell

 

 

     Not that long ago, an elderly man in Holland got a shock nobody wants: he made an appointment to see his doctor but when he arrived at the office the physician’s greeting was a surprise. “I thought you were coming,” he said, “for euthanasia.” The man’s daughter, now a Canadian, called a phone-in program dealing with physician-assisted suicide to remind everybody how prone some Dutch physicians have become to ending an aged patient’s life. (The New York Times reported last year Holland has over 3,000 cases yearly.) The caller blamed the proverbial “slippery slope,” for diminishing the value of life in the country where she grew up. Her call reminded me of a TV documentary where a Dutch physician came to a house apparently to euthanize a man. As he left he looked back at the elderly patient lying on his couch. He nodded, then said casually: “I’ll call the undertaker.” That’s that. Another one.

   I haven’t fully made up my mind on this issue. Not yet. But one thing I’ve decided: to read, think and listen more about it. That won’t be hard — it’s becoming a public discussion.  I begin with taking note of a rather basic fact: in my own close circle of friends, there isn’t a single physician in favor of it. And they mean it.  An old friend, a devoted United Churchman — Donald Cowan former head of medicine at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital and Professor Emeritus on the University of Toronto medical faculty — probably reflects broad medical opinion: “We’re taught to preserve life,” he told me, “or to palliate life, not to end it.”

          One reason for the growing public debate is our aging population: more of us up there in our years. So the media wants to know what we want: nurture or needle? To their credit some hospitals are trying to improve palliative care, in ways sometimes novel. For example, a few years ago, Toronto General began a project designed to help doctors handle the very painful issues that surround it. So the hospital engaged actors to portray family members of a parent who is dying. They fumed at interning medical students, actually cursing them as uncaring, anxious to get mother off their hands, to free her bed for better use. The object was to teach future physicians to be patient, to listen, to express by word and deed, the compassion patients and families have a right to expect. This approach, plus medication, minimizes suffering all the way around.

   Nonetheless, helpful though it is, it doesn’t  answer the question most often struggled with in public: when the outlook is absolutely hopeless and the suffering profound, should society through physicians, have the right to opt for one of the quick if also deadly solutions: (a) active euthanasia, (administering a drug that directly causes death), (b) assisted suicide (in which someone provides a patient with information and guidance to end life), or (c) physician-assisted suicide (which means a death helped by a doctor.) Add to this the complexities brought to the issue by religious tradition and their growing diversity. Most faiths are opposed to any form of deliberately ending life: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and within Christianity, The Roman Catholic Church, Evangelical Protestants and most others except waning liberal churches where views vary. (The basic religious opposition is clear in all scriptures: human life is a gift of God, therefore ours not to take but preserve.)       

    Given that end of life issues are evermore daunting, nobody can be justly criticized for not wanting to sit where a huge decision will soon be made: The Supreme Court of Canada. Its decision will be informed, moderately at most, by the precedent of Quebec’s court, set interestingly in Canada’s most vigorously secular culture. There, the province high court recently ruled in favor of euthanasia in specific situations. As to the country’s federal supreme court, it’s revealed a measure of its its perspective in an appeal by Sue Rodriguez, (a BC woman who in the 1990s, suffered intensely from ALS) by rejecting her request to take her own life with a physician’s help. The judgment was 5 to 4. The current composition of our senior court, close observers speculate, reflects the same disposition. Ultimately, of course, to euthanize or not to euthanize, rests with the parliamentarians.

   We know more or less, their current leaning. First it was put frankly not long ago by the  Minister of Justice: “The laws surrounding euthanasia and assisted suicide exist to protect all Canadians, including those who are sick or elderly or people with disabilities. The Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged the state interest in protecting human life and upheld the constitutionality of existing legislation in Rodriquez (1993.) In April, 2010, a large majority of parliamentarians voted not to change these laws, which is an expression of democratic will on the topic.” As for the vote he mentions, it was overwhelming: 226 to 59. Virtually every Conservative MP, including the Prime Minister – a member of an evangelical church that forbids euthanasia — voted against it. So did many other MPs. I’d say that’s indicative.

 

February 21, 2013