Words matter. "Assisted" suicide sounds so compassionate and caring. A gentle help at the end of life. "Abetted" suicide, on the other hand, seems calculated, criminal and cruel: a push, if you will, to get rid of someone. In objective terms, both could apply to the same action, be that injecting a lethal substance, or administering a pill, or holding the pillow over the face, to end the life of a person who says he wants to die. Helping someone to commit suicide is a criminal offence in Canada even though suicide is not. Why is it then that when the media reports on such offences, as it has been over the past week, it is always referred to as "assisted" not "abetted" suicide? Do they usually report on the driver in an armed robbery as "assisting" the crime or "abetting" the crime?" In his book "Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives", William Brennan points out people use words to justify extreme and violent behaviour. That can mean devaluing the person to whom the violence is directed-so babies in the womb become a "clump of cells" or a "non-person"-or it can mean disguising the activity itself as something benign, helpful. Thus we hear the new phrase "dying with dignity." This all springs to mind now, of course, because the media has been full of stories and columns for the past week on abetted suicide, my term obviously. Early in the week, the Victoria trial of Evelyn Martens, 74, began. She's been charged with abetting two women to commit suicide. Because of a publication ban few details can be reported but it is believed that both women had terminal illnesses. We won't know for certain until the trial is over and even then, media who think this is "assisted" suicide may not accurately report the true facts of the case. The second event last week was the arrest of a Montreal woman, Marielle Houle, for abetting the suicide of her 36-year-old son, Joseph Faralia, who had very recently been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). He was not terminally ill and in fact had not suffered many effects of the disease. He was depressed though, as almost anyone would be on hearing such a diagnosis, especially at such a young age. According to media reports, Joseph and his mother lived together and were very close. He wanted to die and she allegedly helped him to commit suicide. She supported his choice. Just days after Houle was arrested I spoke with Mark Pickup, founder of Human Life Matters. As most of you know Mark has lived with MS for over twenty years. He was 30 when MS struck and when it did, it was vicious. In the first couple of years, Mark was alternately blind, speechless, unable to walk, spastic and never knew when he went to bed what symptoms would greet him when he awoke. He freely admits he was devastated, depressed and overcome with grief. As Mark pointed out last week on CBC Radio, his wife and family would never have allowed him to contemplate suicide. They did not love him for his physical abilities. The sum of Mark's life was not reflected in how his body moved. His disability was one aspect of Mark's "personhood". Mark needed love and support. He needed space and time to grieve. "I did not need those I loved-my wife and children-telling me they would support me no matter what I decided, even if that included suicide. That would have affirmed for me, in my depressed state, that they didn't care enough to save me." How is it possible that we have reached the stage that grieving, depressed people are encouraged to exercise their "choice" to die and often "helped" to do it by those who are closest to them? How can we mistake a cry for love and support for a demand to kill and then call that "death with dignity?" Can poisoning, suffocating or hanging ever be dignified? In an entirely unrelated conversation about a month earlier a good friend of mine who is a nurse told me about her experience at her job. She had in the past month administered CPR on two patients who "coded" on her shift. Both revived, one died within a couple of days while the other survived. She was shocked, however, by the response of her co-workers, several of whom criticized her for using CPR. They thought both should have been left to die, and the subsequent death of one reinforced their view. "I was shocked," she recalled. "One of them had only recently been told he had a terminal disease. He hadn't even had time to grieve or see his family or think about anything. In the couple of days he lived after the CPR, he saw his family and everyone had a chance to say their 'good-byes'." I asked her if this was a new attitude in the profession. She thought it was. The idea of "Do no harm" which doctors ditched from their oath many years ago, is fading from the profession. It's rapidly being replaced, by the "quality of life" argument. Stripped of its niceties, quality of life is really an attitude that says, "I look at you lying in that bed, or sitting in that wheelchair, or speaking incoherently and I realize that you have a crummy quality of life and one which I never want to be stuck with. Therefore, I think you'd probably like to die and if you ever ask, I'll help you do it. If you become so incapacitated that you can't ask, I'll do it anyway because I know what's best for you." When you hear the words "quality of life" or "death with dignity" invoked by people or groups, prick up your ears. These words are code for killing, be it abetted, assisted or just flat out committed. As I said, words matter and we must be vigilant in how they are used and by whom.
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