Eugenics Marches On

Two developments, on in Canada and one in Belgium.

In Canada, there is a bill based on the Ménard Commission's report:

The Ménard commission’s 450-page report (available in French here) said that people’s decision-making autonomy should prevail over the interests of the state.

In the report, the legal experts pointed out the medical and legal differences between the concepts of euthanasia, where a doctor would physically cause a patient’s death, and assisted suicide, where the doctor would simply provide the patient with the means to die.

It underlined a 2012 Supreme Court of British Columbia ruling that didn’t distinguish between euthanasia and assisted suicide, interpreting them both as a single process.

The Ménard commission endorsed the same interpretation.

It also went further to recommend improving Quebec’s palliative care laws and including some forms of euthanasia and terminal palliative sedation in Quebec’s end-of-life legislation.

Euthanasia is defined by the report as the intentional ending of someone’s life at their request as a means to end suffering, while terminal palliative care is defined in the report as a form of euthanasia in which a person suffering from a terminal illness could be sedated and have their water and feeding tubes removed.

Four states have “dying with dignity” legislation: Oregon, Washington, Montana and, most recently, Vermont.

In Belgium, there is a bill to allow euthanasia of children:

The bill, introduced by the Socialist party in December, would lay out guidelines for doctors to decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not a child is mature enough to make the decision to end his or her own life, as well as whether a child's health is grave and hopeless enough to warrant euthanasia.

and,

The decision to consider the bill follows months of testimony by medical experts, doctors, clergy members and others, and it marks a turning point in the nation's approach to the rights of young people, some of whom would be able to choose to die if the law were to pass, even while still being legally barred from driving, marrying, voting or drinking liquor until they turned 18.

The bill would also likely allow euthanasia for patients suffering from Alzheimer's and other diseases leading to advanced dementia, who may otherwise be deemed incompetent to make the decision to die. There were 1,133 cases of euthanasia recorded in Belgium in 2011, accounting for about 1 percent of the country's deaths that year, according to AFP.