My colleagues and I believe that the 16-year-old with the brain tumour would suffer just as much as a 36-year-old, a 56-year-old, or a 70-year-old. Their prognosis is exactly the same once it gets to that irremediable point. Even though we're saying in this bill that nobody under the age of 18 can sign to go forward, we accept as a matter of law, as a society, that a 16-year-old could sign a surgical consent for their own child. On the one hand, we're letting people go to war, so to speak, but then on the other hand, we're saying, no, you can't. I have accepted 16-year-olds signing consents for immunizations. That's legal. That's the one case.
The other case is the natural death. If you are diagnosed with a condition such as a brain tumour, ALS, lung cancer, or any of these horrible diseases, your death is no longer natural. In society, we refer to a natural death as one where the body is played out—you're 110 years of age and your kidneys are slowly packing it in and not functioning anymore. Those are the kinds of things that are thought of as a natural death.
A natural death for somebody with a grievous diagnosis wouldn't happen. As a practitioner, if such a person died, I would not be able to say on their medical release certificate that they died a natural death. I would have to say that they died of complications derived from ALS, or that they died of respiratory failure, or whatever. That's not a diagnosis.