By Deborah Gyapong

WORK is underway on a draft assisted-suicide and euthanasia bill and on a new test case to challenge the Sue Rodriguez Supreme Court of Canada ruling.

 In the early 90s, Rodriguez, who had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), wanted the legal right to doctor-assisted suicide.

The Court turned her down by a 5 – 4 ruling.

News of the draft legislation and possible test case came out on CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup March 2, during an interview with Jocelyn Downie, the Canada research chair in health law and policy at Dalhousie University.

 In a telephone conversation March 6, Downie confirmed legislation is in the works, but she declined to give any details about who is proposing the bill.  

Cross Country Checkup devoted the March 2 program to the recent decision to release Robert Latimer on day parole. Latimer had been serving a 10 year sentence for the second degree murder of his disabled daughter Tracey. Last fall, a parole board hearing turned down his request for release, because he was unrepentant. He appealed and won.

 For Margaret Somerville, the founding director of McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, one of the big dangers in the looming euthanasia debate is how mixed up the arguments and the cases in question become.

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This confusion can be “very favourable to the pro-euthanasia side,” she said in an interview.  “We know that familiarity inhibits our moral intuition, and so now it seems as though they are quite happy to say we should be nice to Mr. Latimer because it was just mercy and compassion,” she said.

The danger of the Latimer case is that it shows how the very narrow definition of euthanasia could be expanded to include compassion as an ethical and legal justification for killing somebody, she said.

 Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) executive director Alex Schadenberg said he expects a new euthanasia and assisted suicide bill to be introduced after the next election.  

He also expects Robert Latimer will be plying the halls of Parliament Hill, trying to win people over.

“His idea is a direct threat to other people,” he said, because others might say to themselves if it was okay for Robert Latimer to kill his disabled daughter, maybe there is nothing wrong with my killing a disabled person.

 Somerville believes that Canadians need to be shocked  into seeing the larger moral context and what it means for the moral context if we legalize it.

 Though she usually opposes linking abortion to euthanasia, she thinks the normalization of abortion provides a useful comparison.

 A third of all pregnancies overall end up in abortion. One in four women in Canada have had an abortion, she pointed out.  “What if one in four people in Canada ended up being euthanized,” she asked. “What would that mean as a society?”  

– Canadian Catholic News

April 2008