HOW WE LIVE WELL IN EUTHANASIA’S HARSH LIGHT

What does the body of Christ look like after medical assistance in dying (MAiD) has been legalized in Canada? A theological ethicist offers another, ancient way forward

The legalization and current expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) has radically reshaped the way we die today. It affects both those who opt in and all others as well, “since those others will now be doing something they were previously not doing, namely choosing not to die,” as ethicist Michael Banner argues in The Ethics of Everyday Life (Oxford, 2014).

To go on living in the face of debilitating illness, physical or mental, now requires justification, especially if we are “costly” patients.

MAiD legislation was authorized by the Supreme Court in 2015 with certain safeguards in place, but the passage of Bill C-7 in early 2021 shows that access is swiftly expanding. In brief, the bill removes the clause that a candidate’s natural death must be “reasonably foreseeable.” Starting in March 2023 MAiD will also become permitted when mental illness alone is the reason.

Bill C-7 represents not only a discrete law, but a broader change in medical culture. As a group of Canadian physicians recount in an article for the World Medical Journal, the introduction of MAiD has led some doctors to deprive severely disabled patients of care. Other doctors show ambivalence about resuscitating patients who have attempted suicide.

Advocacy will continue on both sides of the issue. But merely calling for change in the Canadian public can neglect the fact the Church is a public in its own right, called to live out a fuller theological ethics of dying. Such an approach requires discerning the cultural changes that have made MAiD thinkable. It also takes us beyond reaction into faithful and creative discipleship in a culture where the practice has become a reality.

To those ends we begin with the significant moral task of describing the situation. To know what to do, we must know what is happening.

Truthful speech amid euphemism

Christians are called to tell the truth. We are committed to telling the truth of the gospel, the Good News that God is healing our sickened world in Christ. We also pursue truthful description in public speech, not least to show ourselves as trustworthy witnesses. This work involves challenging misinformation and conspiracy theories, and also involves thinking critically about political and legal terminology.

Such a task requires careful discernment. Because MAiD is a deeply personal issue with life and

death stakes, some condemn the practice in extreme terms. But sheer denunciation, if it has not first discerned the reality it addresses, is too weak. Condemnation of a practice someone clearly doesn’t understand will be easily dismissed as simply off target.

However, our connections in the body of Christ can help us discern the reality the term MAiD represents and think wisely about it. As a theologian I have my own expertise, and I have been given an immensely resourceful community of fellow believers, including health practitioners, professional ethicists, legal scholars, and of course, an array of elders with profound life experience.

This body includes those who know chronic or even intolerable pain and so speak in extremis. In their company I often must simply sit as Job’s friends, in their week of silent, shared grief. These people can help us discern something about the complex issues surrounding the end of life. To speak truthfully we need to have truly listened. The mouth can’t say to the eye or the ear, much less to the nervous system, “I have no need of you.”

Once I have learned what I must, there comes a time to speak. Speaking requires reckoning with how our terms for death have changed. It’s hard to think of a more innocuous acronym than MAiD, a term that also refers to a young woman or a personal attendant. How could anyone question the desire of a dying person to call for the “maid”?

With a change in terminology, we have suddenly come a long way from the more accurate “physicianassisted suicide.” MAiD also now competes with palliative care, which is its own form of medical assistance to those who are dying.

The euphemism did not begin with MAiD. Euthanasia means, from its Greek roots, good death. So what is a good death in the eyes of

With a change in terminology, we have suddenly come a long way from the more accurate “physicianassisted suicide.”