TOMAS BORSA
Opinions Writer

There are a million and one reasons why we might decide to quit before God fires us: on the principle of self-awareness, to prove a point, to end our suffering. It is this final motive that tends to evoke the most compassion.

 Or at least, it should. Despite the wishes of many rational individuals suffering from chronic, insufferable psychological or physical pain, the right to decide the time and circumstances of one’s own death — the right to die — remains illegal in most countries.

For those whose suffering is so extensive that they lack the physical capacity to end their own lives, assisted suicide or euthanasia are the only ways out.

Now is a good time to distinguish between euthanasia and assisted suicide. The former involves someone other than the victim — i.e. a consenting parent, doctor or spouse — ending a life in a painless manner.

Predictably, the sticking point in the argument in support of euthanasia is that “someone other than the victim” is ultimately pulling the strings (the case of Robert Latimer, for example, demonstrated just how blurry the line between “compassion” and “riddance” can become in the eyes of the public). Thus, in most jurisdictions, euthanasia is treated as a compassionate route of exit only when the recipient has four legs and a tail.

    Assisted suicide, on the other hand, involves nothing more than providing the means to an end. Whether it is prescribing a lethal dosage of medication or allowing a loved one to press their own terminal red button, assisted suicide is legal only in Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands.

    An assisted suicide could, for example, take the following form: a 55 year-old woman living with narcolepsy, multiple sclerosis and severe memory loss has constant, debilitating pain and monthly prescription costs of $4,600 (only half of which is covered by Medicare). As a result of her constant pain and overall poor quality of life, she has communicated the wish to die with dignity, on her own terms. She has the full support of her husband.

    Under the Criminal Code of Canada, her husband could face a maximum sentence of 14 years for being accomplice to a loving and rationally-reached personal choice. By the way, that is a real example.

    The issue of assisted suicide was flung into the laps of Canadians in 1992 when Sue Rodriguez, a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease, tried to persuade Parliament to change the laws that criminalized it. In a video recorded message, she asked legislators:

“If I cannot give consent to my own death, whose body is this? Who owns my life?”

If life is having the freedom to joyfully pursue one’s passions, then Sue Rodriguez lost her life long before her eventual (assisted) death in 1994.

    Personally, I feel the debate over the right to die marks the apex of the grand debate over bodily autonomy that everyone, at some point or another, will have experienced in their life. As infants, many young girls have their ears pierced in the name of aesthetics and cultural norms.

Meanwhile, in the next room over, many young boys are having a bit of this and a bit of that snipped away in the name of religious tradition. Years later, those same boys and girls will be told that they should think twice about getting their next piercing, are not allowed to get a tattoo, are not allowed to dye their hair green, and are not allowed to eat this, drink that or wear those.

    In all of these rather innocent examples, the judgment of a guardian supersedes the wishes of the child (unless we assume that many infants are in fact masochists).

    But at some point — the age of adulthood — bodily autonomy has to be returned to the owner. It has never been all right to take a person’s life, so how is it all right to force a person to live against their will?

These are two sides to the same battered coin. How can “society,” a collection of predominantly personally unaffected, able-bodied people, decide that a person’s right to self-determination is only allowable up to the point when it is really, truly needed, when it becomes an issue of self-termination?

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photo: Justina Kochansky / Flickr