CHILDREN’S RIGHT TO DIE
In November, 1973, the publishers of Modern
Medicine, a Canadian medical journal that is published all over the world.
read an article I had written about euthanasia in a law journal. They asked for my permission to publish my article
in their journal. I gave them my permission. At the end of my f0ur-page
article, I wrote the following paragraph.
Consider the case of 1927 that took place in the United States when a
man who had watched his little daughter dying of tuberculous and gangrene in
her face heard her screaming for months on end driving him mad. He took the
pitiful creature into his bathroom and drowned her to end her agony. His jury
returned a verdict of not guilty knowing that he acted out of remorse and that
his act was a humane act. They knew that he would suffer forever, never being
able to block out of his mind the sight of his little girl grasping his arms
and not making any attempt to fight the death which was going to end her
misery. Justice Branson at his trial said, “It is a matter that gives food for
thought when one comes to consider that had that poor child been an animal
instead of a human being; so far from
there being anything blameworthy in the man’s action putting an end to its
suffering, he would actually have been liable for punishment if he had not done
so.”
Soon after that article was published, I was invited to give a speech to
approximately 100 doctors in the Toronto General Hospital about euthanasia.
Prior to that speech, I was taken into a room where a six-year-old boy laid on
a bed. I was told that from his birth until then, he couldn’t see or hear
anything and he couldn’t even speak or cry. The only thing that he did was
smile when he was fed food that he liked. He didn’t appear to be suffering from
pain.
One of the doctors standing near the bed asked me, “If you could push a
button that would end this little boy’s life painlessly, would you push it?”
I couldn’t give him an answer and to this day, I still cannot answer
that question. I was well aware that
keeping him alive would cost the hospital many millions of the taxpayer’s money
but is it possible that he has a functional mind in which he has dreams?
Tracy Latimer was born November 23rd,
1980. An interruption in Tracy's supply of oxygen during the birth
caused cerebral palsy, leading to severe mental and
physical disabilities including violent seizures, which were controlled with
seizure medication.[
She had little or no voluntary control
of her muscles, wore diapers, and could not walk or talk. Her doctors described
the care given by her family as being excellent. During her life, Tracy
underwent several surgeries, including surgery to lengthen tendons and release muscles, and surgery to correct scoliosis in which rods were inserted
into her back.
Tracy attended school regularly in
the Town of Wilkie in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. People who worked with Tracy in group homes
and schools described her smile, love of music and happy reaction to horses at
the circus.
There is no dispute that through
her life, Tracy at times suffered considerable pain. As well, the quality of
her life was limited by her severe disability. But the pain she suffered was
not unremitting, and her life had value and quality.
In October 1993, Dr. Dzus
recommended to Tracy’s parents that further
surgery was needed in the hope that it would lessen the constant pain in
Tracy's dislocated hip. Depending on the state of her
hip joint, the procedure might have been a hip reconstruction or it might have
involved removing the upper part of her thigh bone, leaving the leg connected
to her body only by muscles and nerves. The anticipated recovery period
for this surgery was one year.
Tracy’s parents were told that
this procedure would cause their daughter pain, and the doctors involved
suggested that further surgery would be required in the future to relieve the
pain emanating from various joints in Tracy's body. Dr. Dzus reported that
"he post-operative pain could be unbearable, and described the only useful
short-term solution would being the use of an epidural to anesthetize the lower
part of the body and help alleviate pain while Tracy was still in he hospital.
On October 24, 1993, Tracy’s
mother found Tracy dead. She had died under the care of her father while the
rest of the family was at church. At first Robert Latimer maintained that Tracy
had died in her sleep however, when confronted by police who had autopsy evidence in their hands that showed that Tracy had high levels of carbon monoxide that were found in Tracy's
blood, he changed his story. Latimer then confessed that he had killed her by
placing her in his truck and connecting a hose from the truck's exhaust pipe to
the cab. He said he had also considered other methods of killing Tracy that had
included a Valium overdose and shooting her in
the head. An overdose of sleeping pills would have been more merciful.
Robert Latimer said his actions
were motivated by love for Tracy and a desire to end her pain. His motive was
no different than that of the man in 1927 who drowned his daughter in the
bathtub to ease her permanent pain.
He described the medical
treatments Tracy had undergone and was scheduled to undergo as "mutilation
and torture." With the combination of a feeding tube, rods in her back, the leg cut and her flopping around her
bed and suffering from bedsores, her father asked the police this rhetorical
question, “How can people say she was a happy little girl?”
Mr. Latimer was charged with
first-degree murder, convicted of second-degree murder by a jury, and sentenced
to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 10 years. He
subsequently lost an appeal to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal. However, in
February 1996, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed to hear a further appeal and
in June 1996, the original Crown prosecutor was charged with attempting
to obstruct
justice through
jury tampering. In February 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada ordered a new
trial for Mr. Latimer.
After a new trial, Mr. Latimer
was again found guilty of second-degree murder in late 1997. At the sentencing
hearing, Mr. Latimer’s lawyer argued that he should be given a “constitutional
exemption,” or that the judge should find the mandatory minimum sentence of 10
years to be “cruel and unusual punishment” in the circumstances, and therefore
a violation of Mr. Latimer’s rights under the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On the first of December, 1997, in
a decision that surprised most legal commentators, the sentencing judge found
that a 10-year sentence would indeed be “grossly disproportionate” to the
offence. He sentenced Mr. Latimer to two years less a day, half of which would
be served in a provincial jail and half on his farm. In 2001. The Supreme Court
of Canada ruled that Mr. Latimer's crime could not be justified through
the defence of necessity, and found that,
despite the special circumstances of the case, the lengthy prison sentence
given to Mr. Latimer was not cruel and unusual, and therefore not a
breach of section 12 of
the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms. The Court also ruled that Mr. Latimer was not denied
rights to jury nullification, as no such rights exist,
and his prison sentence was thus upheld.
Robert Latimer began serving his
sentence on January 18th, 2001 and was incarcerated at William
Head Institution, a minimum-security facility located 30 kilometers west
of Victoria, BC, on Vancouver Island. While in prison, he completed
the first year of carpentry and electrician apprenticeships. He continued to
run his family's farm while in prison with the help of a farm manager.
On December 5th, 2007
Robert Latimer requested day parole from the National
Parole Board in Victoria, BC. He told the parole board that he
believed killing his daughter was the right thing to do. The board denied his
request, saying that Latimer had not developed sufficient insight into his
actions, despite psychological and parole reports that said he was a low risk
to reoffend unless he was put into the same situation again. In January 2008,
lawyer Jason Gratl filed the appeal on Latimer's behalf, arguing that in
denying parole the board had violated its own rules by requiring admission of
wrongdoing and by ignoring the low risk for reoffending. In February 2008, a
review board overturned the earlier parole board decision, and granted Latimer
day parole stating that there was low risk that Latimer would re-offend.
Latimer was released from William Head Prison and began his day parole in
Ottawa in March. On his release he stated that he planned to press for a new
trial and for identification of the pain medication that the 2001 Supreme Court
ruling suggested he could have used instead of killing his daughter.
He subsequently moved to
Victoria, where he was required to live in a half-way house five days a week
and an apartment two days a week. In July 2010 the National Parole Board denied
his request to be allowed to leave the halfway house for five days a week. On
appeal to the Federal Court of Canada in August 2010 the board was ordered by
Madam Justice Mactavish to review its decision. The National Parole Board was
also directed by the Judge to apply the least restrictive conditions consistent
with society's protection. Latimer was consistently assessed as having a low
risk of re-offending.
On November 29, 2010, Robert
Latimer was granted full parole. The loosening of Latimer's parole restrictions
took effect on December 6th, 2010
A 1999 poll found that 73% of Canadians
believed that Latimer acted out of compassion and should have received a more
lenient sentence. The same poll found that 41% believe that mercy killing should be legal.
Ethicist Arthur Schafer argued that Robert Latimer
was "the only person in Canadian history to spend even a single day in
prison for a mercy killing" and that compassion and common sense dictated
a reduced sentence and the granting of parole. In their introductory college
course book, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, Robert
Latimer's actions sympathetically motivated
so Lattimer still thinks that he did the right thing when he killed is
daughter.
I am not going to form an opinion
as to whether he did the right thing since I would have to be in his shoes to
form an opinion as to what I would do if one of my daughters was as permanently
ill as Latimer’s daughter was. However, I would never put a child into a cab of
a vehicle and pump carbon monoxide into the cab of a motor vehicle so that the
child would to slowly suffocate to death.
When a terminally ill
17-year-old became the first minor to exercise the right to die in Belgium, a
public outcry ensued, with some saying that the removal of an age limit on
euthanasia denies children the right to life. In fact, Belgium's law
strengthens that right.
Since 2002, Belgium has permitted terminally or
incurably ill adults to request and receive euthanasia from a doctor. In
February 2014, the Belgian parliament removed the provision of the country’s
law on euthanasia that restricted the law’s use to only adults. That led to the
outcry.
Predictably, the uproar resumed in September 2016, when the
first child rin Belgium equested and received euthanasia. Cardinal Elio Sgreccia,
speaking on Radio Vatican, said that
the Belgian law denies children the right to life. But the circumstances of the
case, and the fact that it took two and a half years for this to happen, shows
just the opposite. The Belgian law respects the right to life and in carefully defined circumstances, the
right to die.
Although Belgium’s euthanasia law now has no specific age
requirement thus differing from Dutch legislation, which permits doctors to
provide euthanasia, on request, to minors who are at least 12 years old. The law does require the person requesting
euthanasia to have a demonstrable capacity for rational decision-making. This
effectively excludes very small children from the law’s scope. The request must
be examined by a team of doctors and a psychiatrist or psychologist, and
requires the approval of the minor’s parents. The minor has to be in a hopeless
medical situation of constant and unbearable suffering that cannot be eased and
which will invariably cause death in the short term.
There are few if any more terrible experiences in a parent’s life than
to watch his or her child suffer painfully from an incurable disease. There isn’t
a more difficult decision for a parent to make than to decide if the child
would be better off if euthanized. There
is nothing more stupid than a religious twit to say to you that that your god
will eventually ease the suffering of your child’s insufferable, never ending pain
by praying to that god which may or may not exist.
The taxpayers may very well be sympathetic to the parents who are daily
watching and hearing their child suffering from non-stop intense pain and
begging to die but after millions of taxpayer’s dollars have been spent year
after year just so that the child’s parents can see their living child;
there has to be an end to the child’s
suffering and the monetary drain on the public purse.
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