WHEREVER IT HAS been raised as an issue, the question of assisted death for the terminally ill has fuelled a hotbed of raging controversy, and the recent speech delivered by Attorney General Adriel Brathwaite when he suggested that thought be given to this topic would have raised some eyebrows even before the ink was dry on the speech.
The Attorney General, who was speaking during the opening ceremony for a PAHO meeting on a strategy for health-related law, thinks that at some point we are going to have address our minds to it.
He reminded us that we have guaranteed individuals the right to freedom of speech, freedom of property, and freedom of movement, and wondered if we should not also guarantee people the freedom to choose to die, and to die with dignity if they so desired.
The Minister may have a worthy point. In this country, increasing numbers of our people live to ripe old age with many of them surviving long beyond the proverbial three score and ten referred to in biblical teachings. Unfortunately not all elderly folk enjoy optimum health in their declining years, and the expected “aches and pains” of advancing years are met with stoic acceptance.
What often challenges the families and the ageing sufferers are those debilitating and degenerative diseases which so affect the aged that life becomes a hard bed of prolonged and painful suffering and the quality of life is reduced to a severe infliction on the suffering victim and a heavy psychological and physical burden on the family.
Acknowledging that we are all going to die, the Attorney General opined that “what we fear most is the process, and what we don’t want most is the suffering that we are seeing many of our friends and family go through”. Yet as the AG points out, the issue of assisted death is a moral and legal issue.
It is common knowledge that assisting anyone to die is presently against the law and any change of the law will merit the most detailed consideration with stringent safeguards built into any such law. There are already many instances of elder abuse. Any old person who may have property or money may attract the wrong kind of caretaker whose motive will be grounded in getting his or her hands on the property.
We do not think it will overtax the imagination to consider how a law permitting assisted death may be regarded as a tool to be misused by charlatans masquerading as caring for the dying.
Perhaps the recently enacted approach of the Canadian authorities in allowing physician assisted death might be considered as appropriate, but any change here must be widely discussed as would befit an issue which the Attorney General equates with a human right.
Our society accepts that we should specially care for vulnerable groups, among whom are children, the aged, the infirmed and those physically or mentally challenged in one way or other.
Perhaps the most vulnerable consists of those of advanced years who have to depend in a life-or-death manner on others to care for them.
We feel that any change in the law to enable assisted death must be widely discussed and must take into account our cultural and religious sensitivity on what is a matter not only of morals and the law but about our attitudes to ageing in our society.