Canadians aghast at gvmt report pushing assisted suicide for kids

lifesitenews.com The anything-goes recommendations of the provincial-territorial expert panel on assisted suicide has left defenders of the vulnerable aghast, and nothing more so than at the panel's call for children 12 or even younger to be offered assisted suicide. National Post columnist Andrew Coyne pointed to the yawning gap between what most Canadians think warrants assisted suicide on the one hand and what the Supreme Court of Canada actually permitted with its year-old Carter decision and what the expert panel detailed on the other hand. Canadians, wrote Coyne, think assisted suicide is justified when "a patient is in the last stages of an incurable disease. Death is a certainty, but not so swift as to spare the patient unbearable torment... Suicide seems the only way out." But "[t]he Court spoke only of a 'grievous and irremediable' condition, not a terminal one, and made clear this could be psychological as well as physical." And to the expert panel, that turns out to mean means any illness or disability "'that cannot be alleviated by any means acceptable to the patient,' making the standard essentially open-ended. It dispenses with waiting periods, or the requirement that a doctor be on hand to perform the deed. And, in its most striking finding, it suggests that assisted suicide should be open to children."