I don't want to try to do a better job than the Supreme Court of Canada did in Carter. I think they did a very good job. I think that those words would be appropriate for your legislation. You may add a little bit more, but I think the court used those words because they believed that the right to life had both aspects to it: an important protection of life, and a protection of individuals from abuse at the end of life.
If you just say that we're going to open it up to anyone and that anyone can kill themselves with the help of the state at any time, then you effectively have the state saying, “We're in the business of death.” We fight the death penalty so hard in the criminal justice field, but then we would just open it up, wide open, in the health care field.
I believe the court wanted to say that there are very few occasions on which the state should allow this kind of very dangerous procedure to take place and that we want to have the highest standard, a standard that only deals with individuals who are in pain and cannot avoid that pain and have no other choice. I think that's what they were trying to say, and I think they said it well, and I recommend their words to you.