Medical assistance in dying, or MAID, is a touchy subject, laden with emotion and uncertainty.
For generations our legal system forbade suicide, largely based on the foundation of Western law drawn from Roman Christianity. However, in 2015 the Supreme Court of Canada was forced to revisit this prohibition, as it contradicted our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In Canada, each day about 12 people commit suicide, males outnumbering females by about three to one. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth and young adults. (https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications/healthy-living/suicide-canada-key-statistics-infographic.html)
Willfully taking one’s own life or inducing others to help one do so seems contrary to human instinct, which usually drives us toward defending our lives. We spend billions of dollars on pain management drugs. We use health care to extend our lives through surgery and other interventions.
According to MarketWatch, the average American spends over $150/month on fitness, including gym memberships. But there’s a small but determined minority in the population who for various reasons decide to end their lives—now.
MAID was introduced as a medico-legal procedure for obtaining a doctor’s assistance in dying. A patient would be eligible for this service only if he or she has a grievous and irremediable medical condition. Imagine suffering a disease, one for which medical expertise cannot see any successful treatment and that causes excruciating and ongoing pain.
The patient has little quality of life and virtually no hope of this situation ever changing except through death. These are the unfortunate among us who apply for the right to a medically-assisted early end.
Citizens may bring religious or philosophical (ethical) objections to this policy. Perhaps it offends their sensibilities to what they see as an offence against God or their fellow man. After all, put simply, helping someone to die is basically a kind of murder.
More recently the issue has expanded to consider the plight of the mentally ill. Depression is quite rightly understood to be a terminal disease.
But how would a hallucinating schizophrenic make any reasoned decision about directing his daily life, let alone about ending it? Someone who is mentally ill (terminally depressed, lost in free-floating anxiety, or perceptually disconnected from social reality) is hardly in a position even to consider an end-of-life request, whatever the pain he is experiencing.
Just this month, the Government of Canada introduced legislation, not yet passed, to extend until March 2027 the exclusion of eligibility for MAID in circumstances where a person’s sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness. There is currently insufficient agreement on how to deal with such cases.
Those who might capably speak for them on other, mundane matters using Power of Attorney, or being assigned as a trustee to ensure the instructions of a will, might well be sufficiently qualified to manage those tasks, but deciding on terminating another’s life may be beyond their judgment or their moral purview.
This controversy is centered on citizens’ rights to the direction of their own lives. If you or I were to wish for an assisted death based on the eligibility criteria outlined above, who is some other citizen to interfere? Do we have a right to our own lives, or not?
This issue should not be the trigger point upon which to score cheap political points, but should be addressed through sober, well-informed, non-partisan discussion.