Margaret Sommerville's Ethical Fascism

This Wednesday, Margaret Sommerville gave us another in a long series of morally purblind columns. Once again the subject was death and dying, and once again Sommerville moved unhesitatingly from her personal views on the value of living through the process of dying, coping with suffering and displaying nobility of character throughout, to an aggressively authoritarian view of what the law should be: Sommerville's personal rejection of euthanasia should be imposed by law on every Canadian, and, presumably, on everyone everywhere in the world.

This shift, from personal moral reflections on how she would prefer to die and what she thinks is valuable about going through death without any hastening of the end to the demand that everyone be forced to do the same, regardless of their personal opinions, their ideas about the value of life, and the actual suffering they may be going through, is almost invisible in her writing, but it utterly undermines the tone of open moral inquiry and concern she cultivates. On a merely factual level, of course, her quick and dismissive insistence that pain control (all too often a challenge beyond modern medicine) can be taken for granted by the dying and their families is also completely discrediting-- not to mention the only slightly subtler problem raised by the fact that pain is far from the only form of suffering that the dying sometimes endure.

In frustration with Sommerville's thick-headed arrogance, one is tempted to voice ungracious responses-- the wish that she should die (in all good time) in intractable pain, for instance--or, far crueler, that she should have to watch a loved one die badly and in pain, begging for release. But I will restrain myself-- having gone through something altogether too close to the latter, I would not wish it even on an arrogant and harmful fool like Dr. Sommerville.

The response I will make is more general, and I hope it will provoke some of those inclined to support Dr. Sommerville's opinions to further thought: Death is a very personal matter. No one can accompany you along that journey. At the end of it, as far as anything we know indicates, the traveler is gone, her life finished: she exists no more. There is nothing more immediately, exclusively personal. But the process of dying can be horribly cruel. Pain control, even in the best of circumstances, is limited; in the worst cases, with intractable nerve pain, 'breakthrough' pain, surges that overwhelm medications and complications that restrict pain control options, it can be utterly unmanageable. During our son's last days he said that his pain was under control-- but in his sleep he muttered 'ouch, ouch, ouch...' repeatedly. And suffering extends far beyond pain to loss of comfort, loss of enjoyment, loss of function and dignity, loss of the prospect of a future, and other losses as well. What makes Dr. Sommerville so sure that her preference (as a healthy adult) is not only right for others, but so clearly right that it must be imposed on them by law? For the law to intervene so directly in our most personal and final hours, days and moments should require a standard of justification, a standard of certainty far beyond what can be provided by the narrow opinions and anecdotal reflections of a religiously-minded, privileged and self-righteous believer.