As you point out, I'm not a lawyer, so this is just my understanding of it and obviously not my expertise and stepping outside of that.

I do recall that, even in the original Carter decision and the section 7 argument, I thought part of that was the issue of foreshortened life, meaning that, if somebody is in a state where they can foresee that they will get to a point where they cannot act to end their own life and they choose to end their life earlier than that period of intolerable suffering, that's foreshortening their life. It was one of the rationales, in my understanding, that MAID needed to be an option.

That entire argument doesn't apply to mental illness because, while mental illness causes tremendous suffering and sometimes can affect capacity—although most of the time people remain fully legally competent—it very rarely takes away the person's agency to act to end their life or do other things. Right there you see some differences between some of the arguments that were made on that case in Carter. People sort of forget about that.

It is a significant issue because, as I alluded earlier, of the difference between doing something for someone or someone doing it themselves. When we talk about the right to my own choice, the way I think about that simplistically is that it's the right for me to do things for myself. When I expect something to be provided to me, that incorporates other things. If we're expecting the state to provide an easier, facilitated death, I think it's incumbent on us to think about how that plays out for everyone—not just on one person but everyone, including vulnerable populations.

We know that our laws can affect different people differently. As the poet Anatole France said, the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, to steal bread and to sleep under bridges.

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