Euthanasia: The Dutch v. God

By Jonathan Kay

If the Netherlands didn't exist, high school debating clubs would have to invent it. The country is a one-stop shop for libertarian ideas. No discussion about drugs, prostitution or assisted suicide is complete without at least one mention of "the Dutch model," and how it has been -- depending on what you are arguing -- a tragic failure, or a glowing triumph. On Tuesday, the Dutch Parliament extended the model further, voting to encode in law the nation's extraordinarily liberal, hitherto unofficial, euthanasia policy. When the law is passed, the Netherlands will become the first nation to legally permit mercy killing and doctor-assisted suicide.

I can only hope Canada follows suit. Our bioethical policies are confused and contradictory. On one hand, we have no abortion law, which means women have unfettered access to a procedure that, in statistical terms, erases 80 productive years of future human life; but because euthanasia is treated as murder, our laws still make many of us scream through life's last hours against our will.

One possible explanation for this paradox is that the Dutch model scares people. Opponents of euthanasia have always played up the fear that legalizing mercy killing will put pressure on older relatives to die quickly, or that even a limited euthanasia program might lead to killing on an institutional scale. One of Canada's most prominent bioethicists, Margaret Somerville, warns of this in her new book, The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit. She describes a scene from a P.D. James science fiction novel in which old people are put to death by locking them to a sinking barge. "I have read James's description several times," Ms. Somerville writes. "The horror I felt at my initial reading has not decreased."

But it seems unlikely that Canadian lawmakers would be taken in by such manipulative tripe. Dutch doctors have been performing about 5,000 mercy killings annually in recent years, and we have yet to hear reports of death ships. Moreover, the Dutch euthanasia law is quite clear: A physician can end a patient's life only if he or she is faced with a "voluntary and well-considered" request from a person facing "unremitting and unbearable" suffering. Thus, a doctor would not be authorized to act if he felt a request was the result of pressure imposed by a third party. Also, the law requires that patients have a clear understanding of their prognosis, and that the physician consult with at least one other independent doctor who has examined the patient.

Might unscrupulous doctors, guardians and relatives find ways to skirt these guidelines? As an editorial that appeared in Thursday's National Post noted, this concern is not without basis. But the best way to address it isn't to deny people the right to end their suffering; rather, it is to improve oversight mechanisms and authorize extraordinary penalties for those who break the rules.

But in a way, the issue of regulation is beside the main point. Arguing about the risk of abuse in the context of euthanasia is a lot like weighing the evidence of crime deterrence in the context of capital punishment: It is merely a rhetorical sideshow in which pundits who have already decided the issue along ideological and spiritual lines trot out empirical studies that happen to support their side. The Vatican denounces the new Dutch bill as an affront to "human dignity." Ms. Somerville tells us euthanasia does violence to "the human spirit" and our "sense of the sacred." At their root, both arguments represent variations on the same mystical idea: that it is somehow degrading and morally wrong if the time and manner of a human death is not left to a higher power. Only by invoking God or some other kind of divine, unearthly spirit can opponents of euthanasia overcome the utilitarian presumption that it is correct and good to answer a person's plea for death.

I am not arguing here that the religious argument against euthanasia is invalid. The vast majority of Canadians, after all, believe in God. But I do insist that the opponents of euthanasia be clear about their reasons. Alarmist fears of widespread involuntary euthanasia comprise a mask placed atop a body of superstition. When they argue we should deny mercy to those who die in agony, opponents of euthanasia should have the intellectual honesty to hold up the Bible, not a novel by P.D. James.