Expect No Help

As we age in Canada we must not delude ourselves that when we become frail, lose our autonomy, or are bed ridden and alone, we will be able to call on our health care system to end our suffering, our misery, our loneliness and our despair. We have laws in Canada that prevent physicians from offering assistance to someone asking, or having asked, for help in dying. The anxiety that the elderly experience for years, even decades, in not knowing what to expect at the last stages of life, in fearing loss of memory, loss of continence, loss of mobility, loss of easy breathing, loss of vision, and all the other horrors that flesh is heir to could be overcome were it not for our cruel, tyrannous laws.
But is it ethical to withhold help that physicians can administer to end a patient’s suffering? Is it a violation of human rights, social and civic rights to withhold help? Is it anti-Samaritan? Is it cruel and indifferent? What if the physician has a monopoly over the “help” that she keeps under lock and key? By what right can this medicine be withheld?
Imagine that on a blistering day in August an old man, dressed in rags and not smelling so good, comes to my door and asks for a drink of water. He is dying of thirst he says. He says please. Of course I have plenty of water. I have a water cooler and three more jugs in storage. I say no. I cannot give him a glass of water and he cannot pay for it. I am being ethical. I refuse on behalf of everybody. I foresee a slippery slope. What if everybody starts expecting handouts, freebies, welfare, soon they will all want free water. What if I have a monopoly of water, I own the entire water system, and everybody must pay me for every glass.
How did Churches and Physicians come to control the definition of ethics in social behaviour in Canada? Medicine does not belong to physicians. It belongs to everyone who inherits the Earth. What is left out of discussion and debate around end of life choices is biology. How much of human invention and adaptation is designed to help our biology not our ethics, whatever that is.
Antibiotics were discovered by humans; heated car seats were invented by humans; humans fly without feathers: so why can’t humans decide when and how to die as a way of adapting to the biology of aging by improving human comfort? I hope I am being clear; the right to die is ours, the means to die is ours, but the laws are not ours, they derive from power groups with vested interests and phony ethical arguments.