Language is as vague as the protection offered
By Hugh Anderson
Reprinted from Montreal Gazette, April 13, 2009
Ludwig Minelli, founder and director of Dignitas, told BBC News a couple of weeks ago that suicide is "a marvelous possibility." Dignitas is the Swiss assisted-suicide organization that helps so-called "suicide tourists" to die, for a fee. It's not relevant whether those who seek its services are terminally ill, according to Minelli.
The Dignitas director advocates death on demand. He says his organization is preparing a test case on behalf of a healthy British Columbia spouse who wants to be helped to die with her husband, who has a serious heart condition.
Many bereaved seniors undoubtedly have felt that we cannot go on living without a much-loved spouse, and some have died by their own hand. Offered convenient assistance, others might well overcome their natural fear of death. That is why in Canada it is a crime to assist somebody else to commit suicide, punishable by up to 14 years in jail.
It may not be a crime for much longer, though. Legislation to legalize assisted suicide is heading for Parliament. It is similar to legislation already in force in such places as Washington state, Oregon, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Advocates say not to worry. The legislation contains safeguards against abuse, supporters say. Let's look a little closer.
Our longest experience with how legal euthanasia and assisted-suicide actually works is in the Netherlands. Despite the so-called safeguards, the Dutch government acknowledged in 2007 that a 2005 study by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport showed 550 people died at the hands of a doctor without having given an explicit request. Anecdotal reports suggest that the actual number of these unasked-for deaths is considerably higher. Language obscures the fact that these 550 people were killed. Given that it is legal for a doctor to euthanize patients with dementia or suffering from depression, the statistics are not surprising. The same study said that a few cases of deliberate termination of life involved elderly people who were "tired of life."
Among U.S. states, the longest experience of legal assisted suicide is in Oregon - 14 years. Despite the publication of 10 annual reports by the Department of Human Services, there is no way to know whether the official number of deaths by physician-assisted suicide is anywhere close to the actual number. State officials who compile the numbers told a visiting British House of Lords committee studying the Oregon system that they cannot say whether additional deaths remained unreported by doctors. That was because the department "has no regulatory authority or resources to ensure compliance with the law." One state witness told the committee: "For that matter, the entire account (received from a prescribing doctor) could have been a cock-and-bull story. We assume, however, that physicians were their usual careful and accurate selves."
Oregon's Death with Dignity law contains no penalties for doctors who do not report prescribing lethal doses for the purpose of suicide. Sometimes those doses turn out not to be lethal quickly, causing great suffering to the patient, and a few patients do not die from the dose.
Campaigners for legal assisted suicide seem not to be above some degree of disinformation. A brochure and website published by supporters during last year's successful campaign for Washington's Death With Dignity Law said a patient's written request for a lethal prescription must have "two objective witnesses." As Seattle lawyer Margaret Dore points out, the actual wording of the law allows one of those witnesses to be an heir or otherwise related to the patient who may well benefit. Again, the campaigners promised that no one but the patient can legally administer the lethal dose. Dore again points out that the law now in force doesn't say that. It says that an eligible patient may self-administer the dose, and defines self-administration merely as the act of ingesting medication. "So greedy son putting a lethal dose into dad's mouth qualifies as self-administration," she says. In any case, there is no requirement in the law that requires a witness to the death, independent or not. "Greedy son force-feeding dad the lethal dose could be the perfect crime."
It remains to be seen what safeguards Francine Lalonde's third attempt at getting a similar law through Parliament will contain. The Bloc MP's two previous versions were not reassuring. We shall have to look closely at the actual language of her new bill.
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