Why the Euthanasia Slope Is Slippery
A few days before the vote, my colleague Katie Engelhart published a report on the expansive laws allowing 'medical assistance in dying' in Canada, which were widened in 2021 to allow assisted suicide for people without a terminal illness, detailing how they worked in the specific case of Paula Ritchie, a chronically ill Canadian euthanized at her own request.
Many people who support assisted suicide in terminal cases have qualms about the Canadian system. So it's worth thinking about what makes a terminal-illness-only approach to euthanasia unstable, and why the logic of what New York is doing points in a Canadian direction even if the journey may not be immediate or direct.
In a debate about euthanasia I was once asked, by the husband of a woman who sought assisted suicide unsuccessfully before her painful death, what I would have had the doctors offer her in place of the quietus she sought. His implication was that doctors always need to offer something: In most situations, that means care and treatment, but at the exceptional point when nothing further can be given, it's legitimate to expect them to deliver something else.
This is the logic that undergirds laws that offer assisted suicide only to the terminally ill. It assumes that the dying have entered a unique zone where the normal promises of medicine can no longer be kept, a state of exception where it makes sense to license doctors to deliver death as a cure.
The problem is that a situation where the doctor tells you that there's nothing more to be done for you is not really exceptional at all. Every day, all kinds of people are told that their suffering has no medical solution: people with crippling injuries, people with congenital conditions and people — like Ms. Ritchie — with an array of health problems whose etiology science does not even understand.
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