Our euthanasia point of no return
The price of exalting the personal autonomy of the able and influential is the removal of protections for the weak and vulnerable
Turning nine is something of a milestone birthday for children in British Columbia. It’s when they can ride in a car without using a child booster seat. In Ontario, where mayhem is allowed to run rampant on the roadways, eight-year-olds are allowed to sit in a moving vehicle unencumbered by no more safety apparatus than a seat belt.
I am not up to date on the automotive child confinement laws in Belgium, but in other matters related to child health, children are permitted to be euthanized, if they get the agreement of their parents.
It’s worth considering that juxtaposition ahead of Friday’s Supreme Court decision that will almost certainly declare euthanasia and assisted suicide to be constitutional rights. In 1993, the Supreme Court upheld the Criminal Code prohibition on euthanasia and assisted suicide by a narrow 5-4 decision. The current chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, was in the minority then, along with the then-chief justice. Almost all observers expect that she won’t be in the minority tomorrow.
The juxtaposition is striking. In Ontario, a seven-year-old boy, even with the full consent of both parents, is prohibited by law from placing his backside on the car seat without intervening safety apparatus. In Belgium, that same child, suffering from severe illness, can request a lethal injection.
Two different jurisdictions to be sure. Yet there are lessons here about how confused the liberal democracies have become about autonomy and freedom. When it comes to matters of health and safety — how much sugar should be allowed in soft drinks sold in the school cafeteria, transfats in fast food, bike helmets, child booster seats — the state expands its power over individual choice. When it comes to questions of life and death, the trend is in the opposite direction, exalting individual choice. We are a culture which heaps scorn on expectant mothers who celebrate a friend’s birthday with a wine spritzer, while at the same time aborting more than three-quarters of children diagnosed with Down syndrome.
Should the court rule tomorrow to liberalize our laws on euthanasia and suicide, we will be on the road to Belgium. There will be many assurances about all the strict guidelines and robust procedures in place around euthanasia — just as there were in 2002 when Belgium legalized it. Less than a decade down Europe’s euthanasia road, the milestones have been quickly passed: involuntary euthanasia, euthanasia for treatable mental illnesses, euthanasia for children.
Last October, when the court heard the arguments to be decided tomorrow, I wrote that to embrace euthanasia and suicide as constitutional rights involved three revolutions in jurisprudence: i) abandoning the legal principle that every life is always a good to be protected, ii) embracing the idea that suicide is a social good, and iii) removing the particular obligation of the law to protect the weak and vulnerable. Before the juggernaut of personal autonomy those venerable principles don’t stand a chance in today’s Supreme Court.
Indeed, the price of exalting the personal autonomy of the able and influential is the removal of protections for those who have little autonomy to exercise and are easily preyed upon. We saw this clearly enough in the court’s prostitution decision, in which the justices opted for the liberty of those few high-end escorts that make such compelling figures at press conferences. If the removal of protection for the much larger number of exploited, abused and poor women driven to the streets is the price of that, so be it.
Tomorrow, we will hear positive reviews from the telegenic advocates of expanding the number of suicides and people euthanized in Canada. They will have compelling stories to tell. They will have fashionable spokesmen. We will not hear from those who have no advocates — the isolated elderly, alone with no one to speak for them, judged to be burdensome to our health system. The disabled, who will now wonder if their doctors are coming with counsels of death, do not have fashionable advocates. The truly weak and vulnerable, the exploited and abandoned, do not hold press conferences.
Canada got a break in 1993. Less than a decade after the Charter came into effect, a slight majority of justices thought it a bit of a stretch to create a right to suicide that none of the drafters of the Charter thought was there. Twenty years on, that reticence is now gone. The Charter becomes a tool of the powerful against the weak, much like medicine will increasingly become in the age of euthanasia and suicide. It begins tomorrow.