A right to suicide?

Shortly after Robin Williams died by suicide on Aug. 11, 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tweeted an image of Aladdin tearfully hugging Williams’s character from the iconic Disney film. “Genie, you’re free,” read the caption. The tweet, as The Post’s Caitlin Dewey noted, carried the “implication that suicide is somehow a liberating option” and was promptly blasted by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, whose chief medical officer warned “suicide should never be presented as an option.”

In Canada, however, consensus seems to be consolidating around a different conclusion: Suicide is, in fact, a liberating, acceptable option for whoever wants it.

Medical assistance in dying (MAID) is legal in Canada thanks to the country’s mercurial judiciary.

In 1972, Canada’s laws criminalizing attempted suicide were quietly rescinded by Parliament, though the legislators’ motivations were debated: Was Parliament saying suicide was not morally worthy of being a crime, or was the ban just too impractical to enforce? Prohibitions against encouraging or “aiding” a suicide remained on the books, along with an explicit provision that no right existed to “consent” to one’s death at the hands of another.

In 1993, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 5-4 in favor of upholding these prohibitions. In 2015, however, the court reversed itself in a unanimous decision, embracing the argument of the 1993 dissenters that the constitution’s right to life did not mandate a “duty to live” but instead “encompasses life, liberty and security of the person during the passage to death.” The court ordered Parliament to pass a new law, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal majority obliged, crafting a narrow right to medically assisted death for Canadians in an “advanced state of irreversible decline” with “reasonable foreseeability of natural death.” The stipulations helped enshrine assisted suicide as a tool to expedite the “passage” to death, as the court described - not to instigate it unprovoked.

The rigidity of this permission structure, however, gave the Superior Court of Quebec pretext to overturn Trudeau’s legislation in 2019, declaring it unconstitutionally discriminatory to make the right to die conditional on having a fatal medical condition. A Canadian is now entitled to a medically assisted death so long as they “have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability” with symptoms “that cannot be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.” The Liberal government has promised that at some point, mental illness will be officially folded into the definition of “serious and incurable.”

To be sure, the amended legislation still outlines complex “safeguards.” And yet, in recent weeks the papers have nevertheless been filled with stories of what the first year of Canada’s new MAID regime has been like in practice: strikingly popular, with 10,064 medically assisted voluntary deaths in 2021.

The reasonable conclusion to draw is that ever-greater liberalization will likely continue. In a short time, Canada might well recognize suicide as a choice every person has an affirmative right to make for any reason, with the state assisting and never judging.