The idea that assisted suicide and euthanasia can ever be permanently limited to the dying is poppycock. Those jurisdictions that so limit facilitated death are expedients, the honey (if you will) to help the hemlock go down.
We see this working out in Canada, where the Supreme Court conjured out of whole cloth the Charter right to be made dead if one has a diagnosable medical condition.
The Liberal Government is creating the statutory regime to govern the killing, and put a clause in that death should be “foreseeable,” a limitation so loose you could drive a hearse through it.
But that wasn’t what the Supreme Court ruled, and now an Alberta Court of Appeals says that such language is unconstitutional, and that a non terminally ill woman who has petitioned for permission to be killed is right that she has an enforceable right to be made dead. From the decision:
As Canada fairly conceded, the language of the declaration itself is broad and rights based.
Nowhere in the descriptive language is the right to physician assisted death expressly limited only to those who are terminally ill or near the end of life.
Canada accepts that a dictionary definition of “grievous and irremediable” medical condition could include conditions that are not life-threatening or terminal.
What that quote doesn’t say is that “irremediable” includes conditions for which relief is available, but the patient elects death instead.
So, there you have it. Judges have decided that there is a “right” to death on demand if one has a diagnosed condition the patient believes warrants her or his killing.
Even weak political attempts to make the radical euthanasia license seem a bit limited are more than the culture of death, once unleashed, can handle. Democratic processes be damned.