Canada's highest court strikes down ban on doctor-assisted dying

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/06/canadas-strikes-down-ban-doctor-assisted-dying

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The supreme court of Canada has overturned the country’s ban on assisted dying, ending a 20-year legal battle over the right of people with terminal illnesses to ask for medical help to die.

Canada’s federal and provincial governments now have one year to craft legislation responding to the ruling.

“An individual’s choice about the end of her life is entitled to respect,” wrote the court in its ruling, which applies in cases where the patient is deemed mentally competent to consent to death, but is not limited to patients who are physically dependent on medical assistance to stay alive.

Before this decision, under Canada’s criminal code, a physician who helped a patient die could be punished with up to 14 years in prison.

Grace Pastine, the litigation director for the Civil Liberties Association of British Columbia, who brought the lawsuit, said she was thrilled by the ruling.

“[We’re] completely, completely overjoyed that these years of hard work have culminated in what will be an enduring legacy for all Canadians, and an enduring victory for human rights,” she said.

A key part of the court’s decision was that the criminal ban on physician-assisted death actually infringed on patients’ right to life, “as it has the effect of forcing some individuals to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable.”

Pastine said the evidence put before the court showing this counter-intuitive part of the argument was “incredibly important”.

“It really illustrated the extent to which these laws, as an absolute ban [on physician-assisted death], are not fulfilling their function. The laws purport to save lives, but in fact lives are being lost prematurely. Individuals who fear that they are going to be trapped in a terrible dying process are forced into deciding whether to take their own lives while they still can, or be trapped in a dying body,” she said.

“This was very powerful evidence before the court, and clearly the court took this evidence seriously.”

The case was originally brought on behalf of Kay Carter and Gloria Taylor, two women who have both died since the case was first filed. The supreme court of British Columbia struck down the ban, but the ruling was later overturned by an appeals court.

Carter, who had been diagnosed with a neurological disorder called Spinal Stenosis two years earlier, travelled to Switzerland to legally end her life in a clinic in January 2010.

In a letter to friends and family written the day before she died, Carter wrote that her journey to Zurich had been “filled with laughter and fond reminiscing”.

“Do not mourn my passing, but rejoice, as I have, in our shared memories.”

This is the second time that physician-assisted death has come before Canada’s supreme court. The first was in the case of Sue Rodriguez, from Victoria, British Columbia. Rodriguez had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis – better known as ALS. Her case came before the supreme court in 1993, but they ruled against her. Despite this, in 1994, she decided to end her life with the assistance of an anonymous physician. A movie, called At The End Of The Day, was made about Rodriguez’s life.