LET PEOPLE IN PAIN DECIDE THEIR OWN FATE
Excerpted from a presentation by former Conservative MP and quadriplegic Steven Fletcher to the special joint parliamentary committee on physician-assisted suicide on Jan. 28.
When I was 23, I had everything going for me. I had just graduated from engineering. I was driving to a gold mine in northern Manitoba. I had a beautiful girlfriend. I was athletic. All that stuff was going well, and boom, I hit a moose with my car. The moose went through the windshield, the car went into the ditch, and it was a long time before I got to a hospital, as this was in 1996, before cellphones.
In an instant, I found myself completely paralyzed from the neck down. What does that mean? It means I cannot move below the neck. I do not feel a sense of touch, pain, or pleasure. I have no control of my bodily functions. I obviously have to rely on caregiving 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the rest of my life.
I had tubes in my nose going to my lungs, and because my lungs had essentially collapsed — I didn’t have a diaphragm helping me breathe like everyone else — I was on a machine for about three months, fully conscious, but getting phlegm sucked out of my lungs minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month.
There is no pain medication that can deal with that. It is terrifying. It is impossible to sleep. You think you’re going to go mad. You can’t talk to anyone. You’re experiencing massive amounts of pain, such that your head wants to explode, but you can’t do a thing about it. I call it “wellintentioned torture.”
That was 20 years ago. Let’s fast forward ...
I’ve long been an advocate of the empowerment of the individual, personal autonomy, and having the government stay out people’s lives as much as possible.
You will have in front of you three private members’ bills, two that I introduced and one that (senators) Nancy Ruth and Larry Campbell introduced in the Senate. The first bill deals with amending the Criminal Code. It has some of the safeguards that you would like to consider, I think. The second bill includes a panel, or some sort of review board, to check for best practices. After five years, say, it would report to Parliament. It would collect empirical evidence to find out why people are making the requests (for doctor-assisted death) and what we can do to empower people so that they choose life. But we also have to recognize that sometimes people will choose death. In fact, the Hippocratic oath recognizes that.
The response to the bills in Parliament was deafeningly quiet. It turned out that over 80 per cent of Canadians supported physician-assisted death, even in the disabled community. I had thousands of emails from people telling me their most personal details.
What is central in all of this is that the individual must be a Canadian or permanent resident, must be 18 or older, and must be cognitive. Don’t make it complicated. That’s it. Those are the criteria. I agree completely that we should provide the resources, and increase the resources, so that people do choose life, but again, there are situations where all the resources in the world won’t matter. I think that’s why a lot of people in the disabled community at large do support physicianassisted death. But I would ask those in the disabled community with reservations about this to be more empathetic to the people who are suffering. Having someone suffer, starving themselves to death, or being in pain or in terrible suffering, down the hall or down the street at the seniors residence or in a hospital or at home, having them live in pain and terror — it doesn’t make my life better as a Canadian with a disability. It just makes me sad.
To the doctors and the medical profession, I say be professional, be tough. It’s not about you. It’s about the individual and his or her choices. If the person is a cognitive adult, why on Earth would we impose our views on what their quality of life is on them?