FACE TO FACE/SIMS: Assisted suicide should be a choice, a very personal choice
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FACE TO FACE: Should assisted suicide be allowed in Canada?
Bloc Quebecois MP Francine Lalonde has introduced a private member’s bill that would legalize euthanasia or assisted suicide. Lalonde’s bill is not likely to become law — private member’s bills rarely do — but the bill has re-ignited public discourse on this issue and that includes my colleague and me. Polls show 70% of Quebeckers and 50% of other Canadians support assisted suicide.
My colleague opposes the whole concept of euthanasia or assisted suicide. My view is that people with a terminal illness who wish to die with dignity and end their lives at a time of their choosing should have that choice. Why?
Over the past three and a half years, I helped care for my father as Parkinson’s and related dementia took their heavy toll on him. As doctors explained to us, death was inevitable. One doctor thought my father had about six months to live. He was astonished when, with good home palliative care, my dad survived three years (he passed away in May).
It is due to my father’s experience with good palliative care that I believe that there is some merit in the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association’s view that the debate on euthanasia or assisted suicide be refocused on providing quality care.
But in the end, this is just fence-sitting. It isn’t helpful for people who wish to die with dignity and want to make their decisions about when, in the face of certain death, to end it.
In the last six months of his life, my father could only eat pureed food and drink thickened fluids; the next step was to feed him through a tube inserted into his stomach. He was no longer able to take care of any of his personal hygiene needs.
He no longer knew who the people were who were caring for him, including me and other members of the family.
During my father’s more lucid moments, which were infrequent in the end, he would comment that “this is no way to live.”
While he did not and would not have chosen the timing of his end of life, my experience with my father made me think long and hard about the subject of dying with dignity. That’s why I support that right.
