Cheryl Romaire, who wears a fentanyl patch for pain from a degenerative spinal condition, was recently approved for an assisted death. Credit...Ian Austen/The New York Times
By Ian Austen
Published Sept. 18, 2022
Updated June 21, 2023
CALGARY, Alberta — The first time Cheryl Romaire tried to end her life under Canada’s assisted suicide law, her application was rejected. But after a loosening of the law, she received approval to end her life — and she now intends to do just that.
“It felt like a weight had been lifted off my chest,” Ms. Romaire said recently, as one of her cats and a dog competed for her attention at her apartment in Calgary, Alberta.
Last year, Canada changed its assisted death law, permitting people with chronic, “grievous and irremediable” conditions and physical disabilities to commit suicide, even if they are not terminally ill. And so this allowed Ms. Romaire — who has undergone 41 medical procedures in 10 years for a painful and worsening spinal cord condition but had been told her death from the condition was not “reasonably foreseeable’’ — to qualify for a death on her own terms.
“You can have a good death, you can have your family there with you,” she said. “It’s traumatic still to them. But it’s not the same as the shock of suicide which people will do when they’re at pain levels where there’s no hope.”
Canada is among 12 countries and several American states where assisted death is permitted in certain circumstances. Since last year, it has been one of at least three — including Belgium and the Netherlands — that allow an assisted death if the person is suffering from a chronic painful condition, even if that condition is not terminal.
Although the Canadian law was hotly debated in 2016, when it was originally enacted, it has won broad public acceptance since then, with polls showing strong support. Through December of 2021, 31,664 Canadians have received assisted deaths. Of those, 224 who died last year were not terminally ill, taking advantage of last year’s amendment.
But the change in the law has reignited debate over the system. In March the law will expand again, to apply to people with some mental disorders. A Parliamentary committee of lawmakers is studying what standards should govern those cases; its report is expected in the fall.
Already, though, critics are saying Canada is now going too far.
Among those critics are three United Nations disability and human rights experts, who said, in a letter to the Canadian government, that in legalizing assisted suicide for disabled people who are not terminally ill, the law, as written, has devalued their lives by suggesting “that significant disability can be worse than death.”