Challenge to assisted dying law expands
OTTAWA A constitutional challenge to the Trudeau government’s restrictive law on assisted dying has been bolstered with the addition of a second plaintiff: a B.C. woman who suffers unbearable pain from a debilitating, incurable disease but can’t get medical help to end her life because her death is not imminent.
Robyn Moro, a 68-year-old retired retail business owner, joins Julia Lamb in challenging the year-old law, which allows medically assisted dying only for individuals whose natural death is “reasonably foreseeable.”
“What’s the point of waiting until somebody’s almost dead before you do anything about it?” Moro said in an interview. “You might as well not have the law.” Moro suffers from Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system. It has caused continual excruciating pain in her legs, acute nausea that has resulted in repeated hospitalization and tremors that shake her whole body.
Her condition is exacerbated by the fact that she’s allergic to many of the medications normally prescribed for the disease and for pain relief.
“I can’t imagine having any more pain than I have now and yet Parkinson’s is a progressive disease,” Moro said.
“It progresses and mine progresses pretty quickly and so, yes, it’s terrifying to think that it will get worse and all I can take is a regular strength Tylenol.”
Moro meets all the other eligibility criteria for an assisted death set out in the law: she is a consenting adult “in an advanced stage of irreversible decline” from a serious and incurable disease. But she’s been denied her request for medical assistance in dying because she is not near death.
If the legal challenge fails or takes years to wend its way through the courts, Moro intends to end her life by refusing food and water — an agonizing end that can take up to two weeks before a person dies from dehydration.
“I’ve had enough,” she said. “If that’s the only way of ending my suffering then that’s what I’ll do.”
And if she’s forced to take that “terrifying” way out, she’d like to invite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, who crafted the assisted dying law, to witness her death.
“I think they should see the result of what they’ve done. It’s fine to create a law and then walk away from it and not think about it too much,” Moro said.
“But if they had to see people actually having to do themselves in, maybe it would shake them up a little bit.”
The law was enacted last June in response to a landmark 2015 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada, which struck down the prohibition on assisted dying as a violation of an individual’s right to life, liberty and security of the person.