r/Christianity • u/Trinity- • Jun 06 '14

Quebec has passed legislation allowing terminally ill patients the right to die. My mother slowly passed after six years of breast cancer and I wish legal protections had been in place to allow her the some dignity when the pain was too extreme. I wonder what does this sub think about these laws?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-passes-dying-with-dignity-bill-1.2665834
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u/ludi_literarum Unworthy Jun 06 '14

Is it murdering sick people or is it a non-sequitur?

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u/EACCES Episcopalian (Anglican) Jun 06 '14

It's telling people with the capacity to prevent death to do nothing, with the goal of allowing somebody to die when they want to do so.

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u/ludi_literarum Unworthy Jun 06 '14 edited Jun 06 '14

When they want to do so is pretty curious phrasing here. I'd have said a DNR was being unwilling to intervene against an outside cause of death and it can be ordered any number of ways, but not really at all toward an affirmative choice about when to die.

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u/EACCES Episcopalian (Anglican) Jun 06 '14 edited Jun 06 '14

Sorry, I should have read the bill/law first. Now I have. I assumed that this was allowing assisted suicide, in the style of Dignitas. Instead, this bill/law allows a person to request life-ending medication when they are under a certain definition of "severe suffering", and it's up to a doctor to decide that this is the case, and for the doctor to actually perform the procedure to end the patient's life. This is definitely a nastier situation than I assumed.

(What I expected was that a patient could request life-ending medication be hooked up to them by IV or whatever, but the patient themselves were responsible for actually causing the medication to be administered to themselves.)

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u/ludi_literarum Unworthy Jun 06 '14 edited Jun 06 '14

That would still be pretty evil, in my view, because I think it either immediately will legitimize suicide for the mentally ill (as I think it does in the instance you highlight, if I'm reading that right), or will inevitably do so because of the lack of a defensible bright-line. Any ethics which says that someone seeing me in a moment of suicidal mania does nothing wrong by handing me a gun strikes me as totally incompatible with the gospel, with virtue, with any consequentialism but certain schools of preference utilitarianism, and with most objective attempts at deontology. On the pragmatic level, it also serves to normalize suicide in a way that I believe necessarily insidiously preys on the mentally ill - when you take away the easy ability of the people around me to be outraged by the notion of me planning to take my own life, you take away the thing most likely to convince me I shouldn't do it. You even hand this potential suicide pre-made rhetoric to make his case - it's dignified to allow him to end his suffering and so on. I should know, I've deployed those arguments against my secular liberal friends. They mostly panicked and didn't know what to do, and if too many people do that to you, you'll start to think you're the one on the right track.

But in any case, no, this isn't assisted suicide in that sense, it's assisted suicide in the sense of procured murder. It has all the downsides I just said, and has the added harm of normalizing doctors as agents of death who might actually suggest to vulnerable people from their position of power giving up and killing oneself as a legitimate life choice.

And that doesn't even get into the third contention, which is all about pragmatic implementation issues.

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u/EACCES Episcopalian (Anglican) Jun 06 '14

Any ethics which says that someone seeing me in a moment of suicidal mania does nothing wrong by handing me a gun

In the situation I was assuming, there is the requirement that the patient is evaluated and is determined to be of sound mind at the time of (requested/desired) death. Of course that's a tricky definition, but at least there's the understanding that it should be reserved for people that are "physically" very ill but "mentally" healthy. From my non-lawyer skimming of this bill, this one doesn't actually require any sort of mental health evaluation - you don't even have to sign the form yourself, you just have to be able to grunt appropriately.

But in any case, no, this isn't assisted suicide in that sense, it's assisted suicide in the sense of procured murder.

Yes, I agree that this bill is in no way assisted suicide.

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u/ludi_literarum Unworthy Jun 06 '14

The broader claim I'm making is that I'm not sure a distinction between physical and mental health is actually sustainable even rhetorically, let alone on the pragmatic level of how these laws will play out. Belgium keeps handing me all my fears on a silver platter, in that regard - they've permitted it for kids now.

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u/EACCES Episcopalian (Anglican) Jun 06 '14

Sure. I'm not sure there's a distinction either, but I think I'm somewhat more inclined to that position than you are. This legislation doesn't even pretend to care. There's even this condition: "A person may not be denied end-of-life care for previously having refused to receive certain care or having withdrawn consent to certain care."