A Master Thinker’s Thoughts

The pathetic case of Terry Schiavo, in which the shameless posturing of politicians obscured the serious moral and medical issues involved, has recently revived the ever-simmering debate over euthanasia and assisted suicide. In Canada, that debate burned brightly in 1993, when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to recognize the right of Sue Rodriguez to choose a time for her death beyond the stage when she could kill herself without help. “The Almighty,” mused Hamlet, “has fixed his canon ’gainst self-slaughter.” The secular law of this land no longer forbids suicide, yet religious ideas still wield enough influence to enforce the Almighty’s canon on all those who are no longer able-bodied enough to infringe it on their own. The Court could not, of course, have prevented Rodriguez from suicide when she was well enough still to regard her life as worth living. But with macabre irony it denied her the right to the means when she knew she really wanted to die. Whether the...