Supreme Court of Canada has decided that Canadians may seek the assistance of a physician to end their lives. The decision itself raises many questions, answers few (perhaps deliberately) and has left it to Parliament to develop a law to safeguard the concerns of those who fear it is a slippery eugenics slope, while honouring the will of the vast majority of Canadians who say we have a right to die sooner rather than later when faced with an unbearable health situation.
The last ecumenical statement from Canadian churches was in 1996 (just three years after the last Supreme Court ruling). Roman Catholic and Evangelical representatives were active in intervening in this last case, but many other clergy were quick to post criticisms that were variously tendentious, supercilious or specious—and sometimes all three.
Nor were they alone—logic often takes a back seat when emotions come to the fore.
It seems pointless to review the ruling at this stage. Our goal now should be to help craft a law that aims to prevent abuses, however blunt an instrument the law may be.
One way forward is to see how much we agree on, which is likely substantial. Even those whose conclusions we disagree with may hold important perspectives we can and want to affirm.
We might begin by asserting that life in itself is good. People of every faith or no faith agree with that. Even when a particular life is abused or seems compromised from birth, we do not assert that life itself is bad. Rather, we all recognize that aberrations or exceptions are just that.
We can also say that everyone recognizes that death is part of life. Even people who do not believe in an afterlife recognize that one doesn’t exist without the other.
Further, Christians join Jews, Muslims and people of most other faiths in asserting that God, however God is conceived, is the creator of everything, and so the author of both life and death, as well as the gifts of reason and emotions.
Christians assert this particularly strongly through the doctrine of the Resurrection.
People of faith also join those of no faith in valuing compassion highly.
Christians believe God is Compassion, as evidenced by the Incarnation. Again, this is a central value shared with Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists and Jains, among others.
Compassion—which encompasses the concept of mercy towards those who are suffering—would seem to be at the heart of the approximately 80 per cent of Canadians polled by Angus Reid who support physician assisted suicide where a person “is in a coma with little or no hope of waking” and “previously specified they wished to have their life terminated if they were ever to find themselves in this condition” or “is terminally ill and will die in less than six months” and “is expected to suffer a great deal of physical and mental anguish during that time.”
Which brings us back to where we started. The new law will have to take into account the wholeness of our humanity (life and death, reason and feelings) and the common values associated with that.
If we can all agree on that, surely we will have achieved something worthwhile.
