Compassion? Or a death sentence?
A group representing organizations that support people with disabilities has launched a Charter of Rights challenge to changes in the Medical Assistance In Dying law, saying it abandons people with disabilities and forces them to see death as the only option.
The coalition filed a Charter challenge against “Track Two” of the MAID law, which allows patients whose natural deaths are not reasonably foreseeable, but whose condition leads to intolerable suffering, to apply for assisted death.
Under Track One, the original MAID law, only those whose natural death is foreseeable could apply for an assisted death.
“A law that allows people with disabilities to access state-funded death in circumstances where they cannot access state-funded supports they need to make their suffering tolerable is grossly disproportionate,” the group claimed in its filing against the federal government in the Ontario Superior Court.
“There is no deprivation that is more serious and more irrevocable than causing someone who is not otherwise dying to die,” it said.
A Canadian Press story quotes Krista Carr, executive vice president of Inclusion Canada, which is part of the coalition, saying people with disabilities are ending their lives prematurely because the federal government refuses to support them.
“This isn’t compassion. It’s abandonment,” she said.
