Kicking And Screaming

That is how I plan to go out, should the bill that is being tabled in Ottawa permitting assisted suicide takes its worst-case scenario and results in legislated geronticide.  This is the elephant in the room and no one dares mention its name.  Yes it is admirable that they have excluded children and the mentally ill as qualifying for assisted dying and for good reason.  Neither are in any position to make an informed responsible choice.   I work with mentally ill adults and I would far rather that my clients who suffer from depression rekindle a sense of hope for themselves and their lives and that they never succeed in taking their lives.  The others, it is understandable that they would want this legislation.  I have worked in palliative care and I have given personal care to people incapacitated by strokes, dementia, Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's, Multiple Sclerosis, Huntingdon's, Alzheimer's, cancer, amputations and many other causes of severe disability.  I have seen first hand and up close the incredible suffering, chronic pain, helplessness and abject humiliation that these people have had to endure and live with, many without the relief of death for many years to come.  Not all seemed interested in killing themselves, others, yes, I would say so.  I also, while caring for some of these individuals, only wished that I could administer a lethal overdose of medication to put them out of their misery.  Or was it really to put me out of my misery?

One thing I have come to notice in my years of caregiving experience: those closest to the suffering of loved ones, including their professional caregivers, often suffer emotionally more than the patients themselves.  It is something dreadful and irredeemably horrible to have to witness the extreme suffering and demise of others, especially if it is your mother, your father, your spouse, your child.  This is not to underestimate or trivialize the patient's suffering which is often unimaginably intense.  But because it is their suffering they also often find their own resources and strategies for coping.

In order to appreciate the broad public support for assisted suicide it might be helpful to consider the spirit of the times we are living in.  We have had the good fortune of enjoying the most advanced and sophisticated medical care in the history of our species and in Canada at least this care is universally accessible thanks to our single payer public health care system.  Suffering used to be more accepted as a necessary evil, something to get through like a severe winter, to live and cope with a bare minimum of whining and grumbling, and perhaps to learn some important life lessons from it.  Now, we cringe from suffering, I suspect because we have become somewhat weak and spineless from the good times we live in.  We are more easily frightened than ever, it seems, and will jump at any panacea or easy escape from suffering.  Compared to our grandparents we are a generation of spineless cowards.

This is not to dismiss or undervalue the intense suffering that people who are terminally ill and their loved ones have to endure.  I am only trying to contextualize things a bit.

There is also the equally valid and legitimate concern that we are woefully deficient in available and decent palliative care services.  But palliative care can be expensive and if it's on the taxpayers' dime the less generous among us are not going to be very happy about having to shove out.  It would be far easier just to kill the dying prematurely, or in this case, to provide the easy way out of assisted suicide to save them from the suffering and humiliation and to keep the coins in the public purse.

For this reason I think it is not unreasonable to consider that assisted suicide is going to be a tremendous cost-saver and in these cynical times of unrestrained global capitalism, when making crap-loads of money has become the consummate value of human existence won't it become all the easier to devalue human life according to its cost-effectiveness?

I am thinking of when in Ontario in 1995 and later here in British Columbia in 2001 when right wing governments were elected partly on the platform of promising to effectively punish the poor for placing a drain on the public purse.  Thousands were tossed off of social assistance and onto the street as they were suddenly completely unable to fend for themselves.  Many have died from homelessness.  If our governments with public support are going to get away with this kind of cruel and unconscionable treatment of some of the most vulnerable members of society then why shouldn't they be equally callous towards seniors and people with disabilities on low incomes?  Historically the poor have always been considered expendable and worthless and have always been cruelly scapegoated.  Why not just quietly kill us off under the guise of assisted suicide which of course would be entirely up to us.  But as options and the possibilities of living with dignity shrink increasingly through shrinking revenue and public indifference it is no far stretch to imagine that this could make life so intolerable for some of us that we would want to kill ourselves or for someone to help us do it.  Especially when we consider the timing of this right to assisted dying bill which is going to dovetail nicely with the swelling population of seniors and the strain we are already beginning to put on the taxpayer.

What I am saying here is that no human being has the right to take another human life, not even if it happens to be your own life, regardless the circumstances.  I admit that this thinking is informed by my Christian faith and my deep belief that life is a gift and must be treated and appreciated as a gift even if we are not able to live our lives on our own terms.  That part of living with dignity is accepting that we and the cosmos are ruled by a higher power to whom we will all one day have to give account.  But since we live in a secular society and very few people seem to value the spiritual and moral teachings of the great religions that once steered and informed our lawmaking, not always in the best ways but sometimes in the very best ways, we still have to consent to the democratic process.  The majority of Canadians want this pernicious legislation?  Then so be it.  But I also say that we have to tailor and develop and restrain this legislation in such a way that it will produce the least possible harm.  And this also means that it must never ever become an open door to geronticide, nor a genocide of the poor and disabled.  Not now and not ever.  Our value of human life has to supersede the popular fetishizing of personal control and freedom of choice.  Or they must somehow be brought into balance.  And if they are brought into balance I think we should expect a very long and twisted journey for all of us.