How can it be that it’s legal to kill yourself, but a
crime to help someone take her own life? Ruth Goodman’s recent posthumous
letter to the Globe and Mail editors and Sandra Martin’s profile offer
important perspectives on those questions. So if a person is that miserable, why
doesn’t she simply go ahead and take her own life?
It turns out that it’s not so simple for people with
serious disabilities. But neither is it an easy matter for those of us who in
old age have become frail or have minor disabilities. Imagine this situation:
You are a seventy or eighty or ninety-year-old. Imagine
that you have a disease that is physically painful. You cannot use the toilet
or dress yourself without help. Your eyesight and hearing are both failing. Maybe
you suffer from only one of these conditions, or you might have several more.
Your mind works well, but you feel closer to death than to life. You decide to
end your life, but now you are faced with the challenge of how to do it.
You want to ask your doctor to prescribe whatever will enable
you to die at a time you choose. But you’re afraid if you ask for it, the
doctor might try to hospitalize you. So you have to ask someone else what you
need. But anyone who answers your questions could be arrested and jailed for
assisting you.
The Internet might provide answers. But suppose you don’t
know how to access it. Or your fingers are in too much pain or your vision too
poor to make it feasible. You have heard that there are some areas where it is
legal for doctors to give patients a drug that will help them die, under
certain narrow circumstances. You wonder what they give to patients who choose
to die and you call an organization that promotes death with dignity, and ask what
substance those doctors prescribe. You are told that information can’t be given
out.
Maybe you’ve heard of the Australian book that answers
many of your questions, but it has been banned in that country, and you don’t
know where it is available. If you somehow manage to find it, it will tell you
what drug those doctors prescribe for the patients who qualify. If you can find
a way to get the pills, you could mash them up, but how many do you need?
You’re afraid you won’t be able to do it right. If it is difficult for you to swallow
(a common problem with some illnesses) taking many pills will surely be a challenge.
Midway through the process you might vomit or fall asleep.
But anyway, the book tells you it’s best to take the drug
in liquid form. You feel as if you’re getting somewhere–until you encounter
still another road block. Though the liquid form is available in a few
countries it is not legal in Canada
or the U.S.
So you’re back to square one. But let’s say you manage somehow to acquire the
liquid. The book says the seal on the bottle is hard to remove. If your hands
are weak or curled up with arthritis, how will you open the bottle?
Those are just a few of the obstacles that legal and
other institutions have put in the way of anyone who wants to take control of
her death on her own terms. And even if you manage to overcome several of those
barriers, you will almost certainly need help at one step or another. If you
tell your children or close friends what you plan to do, they may be horrified,
try to talk you out of it, hide information from you, and decline to help. And
never mind that it is legal for you to take your life, if they do assist you,
they will be subject to arrest and jail. Catch 22 is alive and well.