The Government of Quebec plans to broaden the eligibility criteria for medical assistance in dying. For the College of Physicians, which governs my code of ethics, these processes never go fast enough or far enough. Yet, by blinding itself with the watered-down term medical assistance in dying, now referred to by an even less obvious acronym, MAID, the college cowardly avoids the real question: in 2022, when self-determination becomes a dominant value, how talk about suicide?
How do you deal with despair? By this law which continues to grow, it is answered that the caregivers do not really have to face it, but that it is only necessary to validate it. We even found a new term: “Medically recognized suffering”. Thus, more and more, my role as a doctor is not to try to find solutions to these sufferings, but to certify that they are sufficiently important to justify death. I am becoming more and more of a notary, less and less of a doctor.
It’s not physician-assisted dying, it’s assisted suicide. It’s not healing, it’s letting go. One could delude oneself when one made this gesture for a bedridden patient, a few days from his natural death. Now, with the elimination of the criterion of reasonably foreseeable death in the short term, we can no longer conceal this notion of suicide. We cannot continue to pretend that we are treating people when we are content to attest that the situation is tragic.
The disease can bring the people it afflicts into dramatic situations. It is quite understandable that fear, pain, sadness induce a desire to disappear, to give up, in the afflicted person and his entourage. If caregivers have a duty to hasten death, who in society will take on the other responsibility, that of trying to restore hope? It won’t be the doctors. It s too difficult.