Plaintiff in assisted dying challenge gets medical help to die

One of two British Columbia women challenging the federal government’s restrictive law on medically assisted dying has finally been able to end her suffering with the help of a doctor.

But Robyn Moro’s case will continue to be part of the constitutional challenge, held up as an example of the torment individuals can be forced to endure due to uncertainty over the law’s requirement that a person’s natural death must be “reasonably foreseeable.”

The 68-year-old suffered constant, excruciating pain from Parkinson’s disease but her doctor, Ellen Wiebe, determined last March that she was not eligible for assistance in dying because she was not near death.

“To say no to her was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Wiebe said in an interview.

Wiebe changed her mind last month, based on an Ontario Superior Court ruling in June that sought to ease physicians’ fears that they could be prosecuted for murder if they helped a 77-year-old woman, known only as AB, end her life when her natural death was not imminent.

Justice Paul Perell clarified that the ambiguous, reasonably foreseeable death provision does not mean a person’s illness must be terminal or that their death must be imminent or likely to occur within a specific time frame.

Based on that ruling and with another doctor’s concurrence, Wiebe helped end Moro’s suffering on Aug. 31.

Prior to the ruling, Wiebe said all she had to go on was Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s assertion that Kay Carter — the 89-year-old at the heart of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 2015 to strike down Canada’s prohibition on assisted dying — would have qualified for an assisted death under the new law because of her age.

Using actuarial tables, Wiebe concluded that Carter, who suffered from spinal stenosis, could have lived another five or six years had she not travelled to Switzerland to receive a doctor-assisted death in 2010.