On October 30, the Quebec government extended eligibility for medical assistance in dying to people with Alzheimer’s disease. We recently learned that this expansion of the law had its limits. According to information from -, in two months, there would have been no what 119 requests for early assistance in dying. Indeed, in the current state of affairs, the expansion would only be applicable to a very small number of cases, since the law on medical assistance in dying could only apply to patients experiencing great suffering. .
However, as Dr. Danielle Michaud explained, “most of the time, our Alzheimer’s patients are not in pain.” As we can already predict, it is only a matter of time before the legislator further relaxes the law to ensure that every sick person has access to it. But at what cost?
Let us recall that at the beginning of the debates on assisted suicide, the “avant-garde” in favor of legalization constantly assured that the law would be limited to people at the end of their lives. Since then, the provisions have only continued to open up to welcome from year to year all the poor in various conditions. But are we really thinking about the concrete consequences of such provisions, given what is presented to us as a new collective consensus?
Become someoneother
An advance request is a legal object that is curious to say the least. How can a person consent to being put to death, at a time when they will no longer be completely herself? It’s a bit like if we asked a child what he wants to do as a career when he grows up, and once he becomes an adult, he sees himself obliged to follow his childhood dream, regardless of the changes. in his personality which took place over the course of his maturity and his life experiences.
Any comparison is accused of being lame: but in the case of the advance request for assisted dying, perhaps we are in a much worse situation than in our hypothetical example. When a man loses his memory, he becomes someone else. It is not for nothing that loved ones often say that they no longer recognize him: it is because the old person is, in some way, already no longer in this world.
Therefore, how can we authorize the lucid person to decide in place of the patient who he will become, this double of the future? Also, in the state of lucidity which precedes the progression of the disease, the patient cannot know what type of suffering he will experience as a sick person. Of course, a doctor can always describe to him in words what will happen, but until a man experiences suffering, words mean nothing. In other words, no one knows what it’s really like to lose one’s memory until they have had this experience (which we wouldn’t wish on anyone, naturally).
And let us remember this fact: doctors do not have to judge in front of a patient what a dignified life is or not, regardless of their point of view on a patient’s conditions. Anticipated MAiD constitutes in this sense pressure from the State on the patient so that he submits to what is expected of him.
-New social norm
We can ask ourselves questions about the real goals of certain members of the medical profession through the desire to expand “end of life care”. Strange how the number of 119 anticipated requests in two months is presented as a “small number”, as if it were about fulfilling performance targets. Good old Weber was not wrong: we never escape the steel cage of the spirit of capitalism. A law that initially presented itself as an act of humanity in exceptional moments becomes a new social norm. The great anthropological rupture that the Western world has been going through for at least forty years now has not only happy consequences.
By holding suffering in all its forms in horror, we risk desacralizing life and seeing the suffering as sort of burdens of society, costly for the health system, and who would be invited to act as air. The hedonistic society does not tolerate suffering, even if it means neutralizing anyone who does not fit into the ideology of permanent festivities.
If we really care about the condition of patients, we should think about things differently. Even before defending a so-called right to die with dignity, we should above all vigorously defend a right to live with dignity. A suffering patient, caught in an atomized, cold society, with dislocated families and chaotic medical institutions, may indeed want to leave this world without asking for his rest. But don’t the State and especially society as a whole have a duty to make the life of the sufferer more convenient, instead of thinking straight away about their departure?
Photo provided by Philippe Lorange
Philippe Lorange
Doctoral student in sociology (UQAM)
