Recently, Westbank grandmother Gloria Taylor's battle with Lou Gehrig's disease has re-kindled the controversy over euthanasia, dormant since 1992, when then-MP Svend Robinson and ALS victim Sue Rodriguez took the issue to the Supreme Court.
Between public flare-ups of this controversy, patients, families and doctors, have been quietly minimizing the pain and suffering of dying loved ones, often to the point of hastening their death. It's compassionate. It's respectful. It's right.
Whether one calls it euthanasia, assisted suicide, or dying with dignity, the supervised death of a person should be guided by the wishes of the patient, their family and medical professionals, not by legislation.
Opponents of this idea agonize about the thin edge of the wedge.
They worry that we'll soon be euthanizing Uncle Fred because of a nasty hangnail, an odorous urinary infection, or because he can't remember where he parked his car.
No, we won't.
Oregon and many other jurisdictions that have accepted forms of euthanasia have not found that depressed 40-year-olds are lining up for lethal injections or that families are pushing to prematurely end the lives of marginally ill loved ones.
My pious colleague doesn't like the term dying with dignity. He finds it a misleading phrase, used to camouflage a sinister philosophy. Ironically, he is not as outraged by similarly biased phrases such as right to life, right to work and pro life.
It is also ironic that most opponents of the so-called "dying with dignity" movement are also proponents of smaller government, and getting government out of the way, at least in business.
In social policy and this instance, however, these same Libertarians are in favour of big government or an Orwellian power over individual decision-making to make sure that no one is euthanizing middle-aged family members against their wishes.
If grandpa's prognosis is imminently terminal, his quality of life torturous, no law works. Rather, what works is no law. Let those immediately involved decide, in consultation with professionals.
The rest of us should to stay out of it. If I become terminally ill, I want the decision about whether I am kept alive by a feeding tube made by me, my doctor, and my family, not a law concerned more with the scriptural sanctity of life than with me.
