Pressing on to choose life over death
"We wait for God to take our life from us"
There is still much to be decided following the Supreme Court of Canada’s February 6 ruling striking down the ban on doctor-assisted suicide for suffering and “irremediable” patients.
The decision gives Parliament one year to create a new legislation that recognizes the right of consenting adults to end their lives via doctor-assisted suicide. The unanimous ruling prompted responses of joy and sadness on both sides of the debate.
Margaret Somerville, founding director at the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, says the Court’s decision is a seismic shift in one of Canada’s most important foundational values—the respect for human life.
“This is not an incremental change and a small extension of already ethically and legally accepted medical interventions, as the Supreme Court indicates it is,” Somerville says. “I believe that future generations will look back on this decision, in the light of its future consequences, as the most important, harmful and regrettable ethical, legal and public policy decisions of the 21st century.”
Somerville maintains religion plays a role in why she believes the Court’s decision is a mistake.
“Without religion it is very difficult to find any meaning in suffering and that means suffering people cannot find any meaning in life, so there’s no point in going on living,” Somerville says.
Lorna Dueck and her family have had experience wrestling with questions of ethics and suffering. Dueck’s sister-in-law, Margaret, suffers from Multiple Systems Atrophy, the same condition that afflicted Susan Griffiths, a 72-year-old Winnipeg woman who went to Switzerland to die by doctor-assisted-suicide.
“Marg is a deeply private woman, but as she grew weaker with her incurable disease, she grew distressed at all the stories in the media that were pro-suicide for people like her,” Dueck says. “She wanted people to see that God is good even in suffering.”
In an interview done through a combination of an iPad and Margaret’s husband’s translation, Margaret says, “Ben [her husband] and my kids’ love for me will help me face tomorrow... we love each other and we put our trust in God who has made us.”
Dueck, the executive producer and host of “Context with Lorna Dueck,” a faith-based current affairs program, says her sister-in-law’s disease not only brought their family together, but encouraged the need to see the beauty of what is intrinsically true; that it is better to love and serve through suffering than to die.
Dueck is concerned about what impact this ruling will have on how people view medicine in Canada.
“Never before have we expected doctors, and nurses, to kill upon request,” Dueck says. “Imagine looking at your schedule for the day and seeing ‘4 p.m., kill Mrs. Smith.’ There is no profession in our land that has ever faced such work and I think psychologically we are putting unrealistic stress on our medical profession.”
Dueck says Christians should be following Jesus’ example. “Christ said, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,’” says Dueck, “and this following the anguished request of ‘if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.’
“This has been our model for why we do not take our own lives; we wait for God to take our life from us.”
To read more about Margaret’s story, visit Lorna Dueck’s blog at www.lornadueck.com/blog/pressing-on.
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