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TW: content discusses suicide and abuse.
Suicide is an extremely sensitive issue in all societies and all generations. Many of us will know of people who have either attempted or ended their own life by their own hands. While these are all harrowing tales that haunt us no matter how much we may try to chase away the shadows, there is still a distinct spectre that haunts our society’s conscious that has gone unaddressed until relatively recently. That is the plight of those suffering from terminal illness who wish to eliminate their suffering through assisted suicide, when there truly is no light at the end of the tunnel.
Assisted suicide is understood as the practice of medical professionals helping in the premature ending of the life of a rational individual who has decided that living on is no longer bearable, as they cannot sustain their dignity of personhood. Its proponents make a strong moral case that it is extremely difficult to have to watch as your family members deal with excruciating pain brought on by many terminal diseases, those which have no cure and result always in death. However, the issue of assisted suicide has been an issue settled in law in nearly every country for decades. The moral settlement codified in much of global law was typified by case studies such as the United States and the United Kingdom, whose laws say assisted suicide is illegal, an intolerable violation of the ethical standards of medical practitioners, and an unacceptable violation of human rights. Though most countries do not allow assisted suicide, some countries like Switzerland have offered the ability to be assessed whether you qualify to have access to the assisted suicide facilities. Thus, many terminally or chronically ill people from across the world flew to these countries alone, fearing that those who took along with them would be prosecuted for accessory to murder.
This issue was brought into sharper focus for many in the Anglo-sphere in recent years when Canada’s Supreme Court, alongside accompanying parliamentary legislation, have rapidly liberalised their laws on assisted suicide with the new program. The ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ provision was set up so that people with an “intolerable amount of suffering” that has “no cure or treatment that satisfies them” can access the means to die peacefully at one of these new government run facilities. Many in Canada saw this as a deep moral shift, yet it was not something that everyone approved of. As stories and reports were released about some of the unintended side effects, and frankly disgusting negligence and abuse involved in much of the program, a moral outrage was initiated. There are many horrifying examples of abuse and pressuring of dying and/or severely disabled patients into accepting suicide over treatment taking place in Canada. One such example is the case of a man with a neurodegenerative condition who alleges that hospital staff tried to coerce him into suicide by threatening to “bankrupt him” and by threatening to withhold water from him for 20 days. The newfound looseness in Canada’s laws regarding this issue has disproportionately meant that the poor are the ones being encouraged to commit suicide to escape poverty. A woman with life crippling allergies in the province of Ontario was pushed into voluntary euthanasia as she did not have the housing benefits to get a better house that did not trigger a potentially life-threatening attack. Another disabled woman applied to die because she ‘simply cannot afford to keep on living’ and there are many other such cases, where the government has created an off-ramp for people, people whom they have a duty of care, to simply die rather than to address the root cause. The potential financial incentive in this regard is extremely disturbing and dystopian with many disability rights and anti-poverty groups in Canada coming out strongly against this new legislation. The UN in 2021 also expressed that such expansions were fundamentally wrong and that “Disability should never be a ground or justification to end someone’s life directly or indirectly.” Veterans are also a common victim of the pressuring towards suicide, with many veterans in Canada, like many veterans across the world, suffering from intense and destabilising mental health conditions that destabilise their reintegration into everyday life. One man alleges that on the first call with the Veteran Affairs line for his future care for his numerous mental illnesses stemming from the trauma he endured, he was repeatedly ‘pressured’ into committing medically assisted suicide.
For these few people, and the many other stories that exist of abuse and neglect within Canada’s nationalised healthcare system, the state was the Grim Reaper whom they embraced out of utter hopelessness when there should have been hope yet to find. The Canadian state failed these people, its vague language in framing the law potentially opens an even greater number of people to accept their premature death at the hands of the state. Ranging from veterans to the poor, to the disabled, the victims of this negligence are those who most needed the state to be there for them, and its failure is thus even more complete and total as it turns its back on these peoples’ suffering.
It is, in conclusion, of course difficult due to the enormous complexity and moral depth of this issue to propose any suitable reform that will be acceptable to the most affected groups, but I do think that this debate must not be dictated at the legislative level. Policy rarely captures nuance in its broad-stroke prohibition or legalisation and each individual case presents a whole myriad of different moral and political dilemmas and thus nuance is needed, and so I do think an unspoken and not necessarily legal answer must be found.
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