ProWomanProLife

  • The Story
  • The Women
  • Notable Columns
  • Contact Us
You are here: Home / All Posts / February 6, 2015

February 6, 2015

February 6, 2015 by Andrea Mrozek Leave a Comment

The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision about Canada’s laws on euthanasia/assisted suicide will be released today at 9:45 am.

I don’t think anyone is holding their breath. Father De Souza’s article in the Post is most excellent, very poignant, very worth reading:

Should the court rule tomorrow to liberalize our laws on euthanasia and suicide, we will be on the road to Belgium. There will be many assurances about all the strict guidelines and robust procedures in place around euthanasia — just as there were in 2002 when Belgium legalized it. Less than a decade down Europe’s euthanasia road, the milestones have been quickly passed: involuntary euthanasia, euthanasia for treatable mental illnesses, euthanasia for children.

Last October, when the Court heard the arguments to be decided tomorrow, I wrote that to embrace euthanasia and suicide as constitutional rights involved three revolutions in jurisprudence: i) abandoning the legal principle that every life is always a good to be protected, ii) embracing the idea that suicide is a social good, and iii) removing the particular obligation of the law to protect the weak and vulnerable. Before the juggernaut of personal autonomy those venerable principles don’t stand a chance in today’s Supreme Court.

Indeed, the price of exalting the personal autonomy of the able and influential is the removal of protections for those who have little autonomy to exercise and are easily preyed upon. We saw this clearly enough in the court’s prostitution decision, in which the justices opted for the liberty of those few high-end escorts that make such compelling figures at press conferences. If the removal of protection for the much larger number of exploited, abused and poor women driven to the streets is the price of that, so be it.

Tomorrow, we will hear positive reviews from the telegenic advocates of expanding the number of suicides and people euthanized in Canada. They will have compelling stories to tell. They will have fashionable spokesmen. We will not hear from those who have no advocates — the isolated elderly, alone with no one to speak for them, judged to be burdensome to our health system. The disabled who will now wonder if their doctors are coming with counsels of death do not have fashionable advocates. The truly weak and vulnerable, the exploited and abandoned, do not hold press conferences.

Canada got a break in 1993. Less than a decade after the Charter came into effect, a slight majority of justices thought it a bit of a stretch to create a right to suicide that none of the drafters of the Charter thought was there. Twenty years on, that reticence is now gone. The Charter becomes a tool of the powerful against the weak, much like medicine will increasingly become in the age of euthanasia and suicide. It begins tomorrow.

Since Father De Souza published this yesterday, I can add now that all this begins today.

Screen Shot 2015-02-06 at 9.16.35 AM

Father Raymond de Souza

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather

Filed Under: All Posts, Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia, Featured Media

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Follow Us

Facebooktwitterrssby feather

Notable Columns

  • A pro-woman budget wouldn't tell me how to live my life
  • Bad medicine
  • Birth control pills have side effects
  • Canada Summer Jobs debacle–Can Trudeau call abortion a right?
  • Celebrate these Jubilee jailbirds
  • China has laws against sex selection. But not Canada. Why?
  • Family love is not a contract
  • Freedom to discuss the “choice”
  • Gender quotas don't help business or women
  • Ghomeshi case a wake-up call
  • Hidden cost of choice
  • Life at the heart of the matter
  • Life issues and the media
  • Need for rational abortion debate
  • New face of the abortion debate
  • People vs. kidneys
  • PET-P press release
  • Pro-life work is making me sick
  • Prolife doesn't mean anti-woman
  • Settle down or "lean in"
  • Sex education is all about values
  • Thank you, Camille Paglia
  • The new face of feminism
  • Today’s law worth discussing
  • When debate is shut down in Canada’s highest places

Categories

  • All Posts
  • Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia
  • Charitable
  • Ethics
  • Featured Media
  • Featured Posts
  • Feminism
  • Free Expression
  • International
  • Motherhood
  • Other
  • Political
  • Pregnancy Care Centres
  • Reproductive Technologies

All Posts

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2022 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in