Court rules on controversial euthanasia case
VANCOUVER, BC—Doctors, ethicists and vulnerable Canadians are closely watching a court case in British Columbia. The B.C. Court of Appeal heard the Carter case, which centres on euthanasia and assisted suicide, beginning March 18.
The court challenge was initially launched by a pro-euthanasia group of plaintiffs, including the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. In the lower court decision last June, Justice Lynn Smith ruled that the laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide are unconstitutional.
The Attorney General appealed the decision.
If the appeal court upholds the ruling, the implications could be far reaching, says Mark Pickup.
Pickup was a 30-year-old civil servant, athletic and healthy, when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He reached a low point two years into his transition to disability and weakness.
"My sorrow was so deep. My heartache was so sharp," says Pickup, who now advocates for the disabled and writes about issues surrounding the sanctity of human life. "If I hadn't been surrounded by people who love me, who held up my human dignity when I didn't even believe in it, I might not be here today."
Margaret Somerville, the founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, believes legalizing euthanasia is a bad idea. She respectfully, but profoundly, disagrees with the lower court decision.
Allowing euthanasia reduces respect for human life, she says. She believes it is a myth that assisted suicide doesn't concern anyone but the person whose life is ended.
"Society and the profession of medicine and the individual person, whether it is a doctor or someone else, all become complicit in killing that person," says Somerville. "Therefore it doesn't just involve that person who gets killed. It involves all of those other people and institutions."
Pickup agrees. "If I choose to commit suicide, it doesn't just affect me," he says. "It affects my wife, my grandchildren, my community. And in a small, but not uncertain way, it will affect my nation, by helping to entrench the notion that there is such a thing as a life unworthy to be lived."
A palliative care physician in Vancouver, B.C., Dr. Margaret Cottle doesn't want to be pressured to end the lives of her patients. She identifies serious problems with the physician-patient relationship if doctor-assisted suicide is legalized. Cottle asks, "What does it say about our profession, if sometimes we're healers and sometimes we're killers?"
Cottle and Somerville both point to significant abuses in places where euthanasia and assisted suicide have been legalized, like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Oregon.
"We know that it is abused and you can't stop its abuse," says Somerville. "And its abuses are on old and disabled and vulnerable people. Once you legalize it, the category of people on whom it is used expands."
Pickup believes Canada is at a watershed point. "If we will not stand up for the value of human life, what will we stand up for?" he asks. "We have a responsibility as Christians to speak up for the weakest."
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