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EUTHANASIA IN CANADA
Andrew Fulford
Canadian Law
Mr. Weinger
Friday, November 30, 2001
EUTHANASIA IN CANADA
Euthanasia, or “good death”, is illegal under section 241 of the Canadian Criminal Code, and is immoral, so therefore should remain illegal in Canada. The “good death” has long been a crime committed by humanity against his fellow man. In the times of the Greek and Roman empires euthanasia was accepted. However, Christian morality and the Greek physician Hippocrates revolutionized those empires. Unfortunately some “civilized” countries still allow euthanasia and legislate it as legal. It’s popularity, however, has no bearing on the great moral injustice that it truly is. Medically, euthanasia has not been mastered, many attempts today still being tragic failures. Patients end up in more pain than they were to start with. Legally, euthanasia is still illegal under section 241 of the Canadian Criminal Code, but due to public support, may be repealed in the not too distant future. Finally, with regards to philosophy and morality, euthanasia violates true human morality and degrades human beings to mere instruments of pleasure. The Nazis capitalized on today’s popular view of morality and slowly caused the slaughter of six million Jews. The evil that is encroaching on Canada was described perfectly by the legendary author, C.S. Lewis:
“The greatest evil is done not in sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint, or even in concentration camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices."[1]
The legality of this law, as with basically any law, is founded on the notion of right and wrong. If the act of euthanasia is declared “right”, then it opens the door for legislated murder.
Medically, euthanasia is considered an abhorrent practice that does, in fact, turn out for the worse in a significant fraction of procedures. The main creed of the medical profession is the Hippocratic oath, which clearly states, “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly, I will not give to a woman an abortion pessary. But I will preserve the purity of my life and my art.”[2] Euthanasia has always been a condemnable act to doctors. The chief reason for this is that doctors are supposed to be healers, people who uphold the supreme value of human life. Today, however, in places like the Netherlands, the medical community has permitted active voluntary and active involuntary euthanasia. In laymen’s terms this means that doctors are allowed to kill, with the use of a lethal injection or another method, their patients at the patient’s request, which is active voluntary euthanasia, or at their own discretion, which is active involuntary euthanasia, and thus ignore the very values that they swear by. [3]
The other kind of euthanasia, passive euthanasia, also known as “pulling the plug”, will not be referred to as euthanasia for the purposes of this paper. Removing life support is not equivalent to directly killing the patient. If a physician, or a patient’s family, decides to take their loved one off of an artificial respirator, they are not at the same time taking all the oxygen out of the room. The patient dies a natural death.
In the Netherlands, as well as elsewhere, there is popular myth that euthanasia is “clean cut” process that ends the life of the patient almost instantly. This idea however, is a myth. According to the New England Journal of Medicine the process of euthanasia can sometimes cause more pain than foregoing the procedure would have caused. The Journal reports that:
“Extreme gasping and muscle spasms can occur. While losing consciousness, a person can vomit and then inhale the vomit. Panic, feelings of terror and assualtive behavior take place from the drug-induced confusion. Other problems can include difficulty in taking the drugs, failure of the drugs to induce unconsciousness and a number of days elapsing before death occurs.”[4]
The same Journal also reports disturbing statistics about euthanasia in the Netherlands. Muscle spasms and similar physical anxieties, such as gasping and vomiting, occurred in 7% of euthanasia cases.[5] In 18% of cases complications arose that ‘forced’ doctors to perform non-voluntary euthanasia.[6] Finally, as if the statistics were not bad enough, failed euthanasia is probably more prevalent then what is reported because doctors whose patients suffer faulty procedures probably would not report the event.
Not only is active euthanasia medically objectionable, it is also illegal by the Criminal Code of Canada. Section 241 of the Code states, “Everyone who counsels a person to commit suicide or aids or abets a person to commit suicide, whether suicide ensues or not, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.”[7] Also, another important Code section, 14, denies the “right to die” that euthanasia supporters claim. The Code declares that, “No person is entitled to consent to have death inflicted on him, and such consent does not affect the criminal responsibility of any person by whom death may be inflicted on the person by whom consent is given.”[8] These two Code sections reject both active voluntary and active involuntary euthanasia as indictable offences. No patient can say to their doctor “kill me” because of section 14 and no doctor can say to their patient “you need to die” because of section 241.
A new Bill has been proposed to subtly overturn the euthanasia laws in the country. The Medical Facilitations Act, as it has been called, weakens the protection given to “vulnerable” people, such as elderly, disabled, or incompetent. Proponents of Bill S-2 say that the Bill is clarifying the right to refuse medical treatment. Opponents of the Bill say that these rights have already been clearly defined and do not need clarification. They proceed to accuse the promoters of using deceptive language to try to allow passive euthanasia into the Criminal Code as legal. One such section of the Bill “could result in the intentional starvation and dehydration of elderly, disabled or incompetent patients who are not terminal.”[9]Another part of the Bill, section 3, allows consent to passive euthanasia by use of a written note. As before, the opponents suggest that this clause could be used to exploit vulnerable people for possible inheritance or other incentive.
Although Bills like the Medical Facilitations Act are being opposed on legal and moral grounds, most people today agree with euthanasia and the “right to death”. A recent poll illustrates that 76% of Canadian citizens agree with euthanasia while 21% oppose the idea.[10] As a point of clarification, 81% of Canadians under 35 agree with euthanasia, while only 69% of Canadians above 55 agree with the it.[11] This seems to show that as people get closer to death, they agree with euthanasia less. So, because there seems to be lessening support from older age groups, and because it is clearly illegal by the Criminal Code, the only point left to contest is the moral grounds for euthanasia.
The weakest point for the “right to death” and euthanasia in general is the moral foundation. In today’s secular society, moral relativism is prevalent. This is the view that right and wrong, or morality, is relative to the person or society. Unfortunately, what moral relativists don’t realize is that without objective moral standards, the concept of law cannot honestly be grounded to anything other than precedent. This view is intuitively objectionable, because it would make moral reformers, the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., immoral and criminal because they do not agree with the popular view. A difficulty arises when humanists, those who say human beings are the measure of all things, try to justify morals with a “majority” or “society says so” view.[12] What this means in plain English is that what is legal is moral, and what is moral is legal, and that society defines both. This seams reasonable, but unfortunately it misses the target of defining morality. It is an invalid view because the idea of legality is built upon the idea of morality. If, as society says, morals are built upon the common view, then laws lose their objective foundation. One Socratic question that should be asked is “why should anyone follow the laws of society when there are no morals?” If one answers with the “because society says so” then they have used circular reasoning. On the other hand, if they say you should follow the law because it is ‘right’ then they have destroyed their argument for subjective morality because they then have to explain where that ‘right’ came from.[13] From this simple question it can be seen that morality is taken for granted as objective in the conscience of human beings. The argument for objective morality, known as the “Divine Command Theory”, which is called so because the theory declares God as the source of objective moral laws, is used in Christian theology and philosophy.[14] The Bible explains, with emphasis:
“For as many as have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and as many as have sinned in the law will be judged by the law (for not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be justified; for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.” [15]
As laws become less based on moral grounding, corrupt authorities become more of a threat to society, and human lives become of less worth. A devastating argument, known as the “slippery slope”, has been proposed by pro-lifers to maintain the illegality of euthanasia. This line of reasoning goes as follows: a society allows the death of a specific individual such as infants with birth defects, then it follows that other, “undesirable” individuals, such as seniors or terminally ill patients, can be eliminated. After physically disabled people can be “removed” then the mentally disabled individuals follow. Continuing on this path, the government can finally eliminate those who are an economic or political strain to the state. Using the preceding argument as a scale, we can rate modern day nations. Some states in America, and the Netherlands, both would rank on ‘step 2’, the elimination of undesirables.
From this scale we can also rank one of the most infamous societies in history, the Nazis. One Nazi doctor was quoted during the Holocaust, “Of course, I am a doctor and want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”[16] This is a horrible display of falling down the ‘slippery slope’. In this era the Nazis coined the phrase “life unworthy of living”, describing all life that was deemed “unworthy” by the state. They also called killing a “therapeutic imperative”, as is displayed by calling the Jews a “gangrenous appendix”. These ideas are being resurrected today with the proponents of euthanasia.
The heart of the entire euthanasia debate resides upon the foundational issue of the value of man. All answers to this question form answers to euthanasia. The contemporary view of the value of a human being is that of an extrinsic or instrumental worth. An instrumental value is a value that leads to an intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is that which has meaning in and of itself. If human life is extrinsic, getting value from outside itself, then euthanasia is reasonable because extrinsic human life should be ended if it cannot lead to an intrinsic good, such as the betterment of society, pleasure or happiness.[17] Thus, the contemporary push for euthanasia is seen in the context of its under girding philosophy. This view, though, has not gone uncontested.
Intrinsic human value is defended by Judeo-Christians. In Judeo-Christian philosophy man is made in the image of God, thus should be respected as such. This belief is recorded in the first book of the Bible, “Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man his blood shall be shed; for in the image of God He made man.”[18] This one principle is the foundation of all Mosaic Law and Judeo-Christian belief regarding the importance of man. Furthermore, anyone who has ever tried to prevent a person from committing suicide, or who has called a child’s death tragic, can testify that this is true, because they know, as well as everyone else, that life has ‘meaning’.[19] People have it ‘burned’ into their conscience that human life is “sacred”, and they cannot avoid it no matter how they try. This is why in every society, murder, the killing of another human being, is seen as clearly wrong. Consequently, if human life is of intrinsic value then killing it is the worst possible evil, above pain, suffering and economic strain.
Ever since the advent of Hippocrates physicians have been repulsed by active euthanasia. They have sworn to protect, heal, and continue life. Active euthanasia is a scarlet blemish on the white coats of physicians collectively. So far, Canada has made the prudent choice regarding the prohibition of active euthanasia. They have been sure to protect the rights of vulnerable people so that immoral criminals will not exploit them. Finally, the philosophy of moral relativism fails to eliminate objective morality and defeat the Divine Command Theory, which holds all laws in place. Accordingly, the moral law for intrinsic human worth is clear to all humans, and cannot be tossed aside lightly. Therefore, because of the failure of euthanasia supporters to provide a basis for the legality and morality of active euthanasia, the Criminal Code laws in Canada are well founded and should continue to make the immoral practice of euthanasia illegal.
Works Cited
Koukl, Greg. Stand to Reason Commentary – “Society Says” Relativism. N/A. 29 Nov.
2001. <
Koukl, Greg. Stand to Reason Commentary – Goodness by Gallup. N/A. 29 Nov. 2001.
<
Koukl, Greg. Stand to Reason Commentary – The Nazi Doctors. N/A. 29 Nov. 2001.
<
Koukl, Greg. Stand to Reason Commentary – Knowledge by Intuition. N/A. 29 Nov.
2001. <
Lewis, C.S., Selected Books – Screwtape Letters (London: HarperCollinsReligious,
1999), 736.
Angus Reid Poll (Canada: Angus Reid Group, Inc., 1997).
Bill S-2. N/A. 29 Nov. 2001
2/bill_s-2.htm.
Martin’s Annual Criminal Code. Aurora: Canadian Law Books Inc., 1998.
New England Journal of Medicine¸ (February 2000).
“Oath of Hippocrates,” Harvard Classics, Volume 38. P.F., (Boston: Collier and Son,
1910).
The Movie “One True Thing” and Euthanasia. 2000. 29 Nov. 2001
The Reformation Study Bible, New King James Version. R.C. Sproul, General Editor.
Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1982.
[1]Lewis, C.S., Selected Books – Screwtape Letters (London: HarperCollinsReligious, 1999), 736.
[2] “Oath of Hippocrates,” Harvard Classics, Volume 38. P.F., (Boston: Collier and Son, 1910).
[3]The Movie “One True Thing” and Euthanasia. Internet. 12 Dec. 1996. Available
[4] New England Journal of Medicine, (February 2000).
5 New England Journal of Medicine, (February 2000), 551, 554.
6 New England Journal of Medicine, (February 2000), 551, 554.
[7]Martin’s Annual Criminal Code. Aurora: Canadian Law Books Inc., 1998.
[8]Martin’s Annual Criminal Code. Aurora: Canadian Law Books Inc., 1998.
[9]Bill S-2. Internet. 29 Nov. 2001. Available
[10]Angus Reid Poll (Canada: Angus Reid Group, Inc., 1997).
[11]Angus Reid Poll (Canada: Angus Reid Group, Inc., 1997).
[12]Stand to Reason Commentary – “Society Says” Relativism. Internet. 29 Nov. 2001. Available
[13]Stand to Reason Commentary – Goodness by Gallup. Internet. 29 Nov. 2001. Available
[14]Stand to Reason Commentary – Goodness by Gallup. Internet. 29 Nov. 2001. Available
[15]New King James Version, Rom. 2:12-15a.
[16]Stand to Reason – The Nazi Doctors. Internet. 29 Nov. 2001. Available
[17]Stand to Reason – The Nazi Doctors. Internet. 29 Nov. 2001. Available<
[18] Gen 9:6
[19]Stand to Reason Commentary – Knowledge by Intuition. Internet. 29 Nov. 2001. Available