New plaintiff in assisted dying case
A constitutional challenge to the Trudeau government’s restrictive law on assisted dying has been bolstered by 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-yearold 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’s terrifying to think that it will get worse and all I can take is a regularstrength 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.”
The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, which is spearheading the challenge, also led the original challenge that led to the Supreme Court’s ruling. The association launched its latest challenge within days of the law being enacted, with Julia Lamb as the sole plaintiff.
Lamb is a wheelchairbound 26-year-old who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy, a degenerative disease she fears will consign her to years of unbearable suffering, unable to breathe without a ventilator or eat without a feeding tube.
No trial date has yet been set but the case is not expected to be heard until next year.