Is assisted dying a ‘clear and present danger’ to people with disabilities? New US film asks tough questions | Movies

IIn 1983, Elizabeth Bouvia, a 26 -year -old woman in California, who suffers from an incurable but exhausted disease, tried to starve herself to death in the hospital. “I made a confident and rational decision,” she said.

Doctors began to feed her by force, but she resisted. The legal issue that followed it turned it into an intense public attention. “Elizabeth Bouvia is a young, beautiful, smart – and ready to die.”

Bouvia, which was suffering from cerebral palsy and acute joints, can live for 15 or 20 years with treatment, according to its doctors. But she insisted that life does not deserve to live and that life in the hospital is unbearable. She lost her case. The court ruled that it had no right to death.

After Bouvia lost her case, she disappeared from view. Red Davbort, documentary films director, wanted to know more. Life after that feature documentary It is presented for the first time this month in Sundance, he looks at Bouvia’s story and raises greater questions about compassionate killing and helping death.

Davburt is also suffering from cerebral palsy, and his documentary research has left it that disabled people or with chronic diseases who ask to help death are often a reaction to a lack of support or believe that the world does not want them.

“Helping suicide is a clear and standing danger to people with disabilities,” Davborte said during a recent video call. “I am taking this position from a left point of view.”

Today, in some judicial states, Bouvia will have the right to death. In 2019, Canada expanded the medical assistance program during death to allow applicants with chronic diseases to request euthanasia through an overdose even if their death was not “reasonably expected”. Canada plans to start allowing requests from people who suffer from Psychiatry only In 2027.

More than 13,000 Canadians He died By helping death in 2022 – 4.1% of Canadian deaths. This represents a 30 % increase compared to the previous year, according to what he mentioned Report preparation Written by Liland Seko for the Guardian newspaper.

Ten American states and boycott of Colombia allow the provision of “medical assistance at death”, but with strict conditions, which usually require the diagnosis of normal death within six months. California, with a population of the same population of Canada, king Only 853 deaths with medical assistance in 2022. The United Kingdom is currently discussing legislation to legislate death with medical assistance.

One of the previous Davborte films was a documentary film called “I did not see you there”, which he sought to achieve To transfer Life with disability is not by directing the camera towards itself, but by directing it abroad, from the location of a roaming wheelchair, towards the rest of society.

Davbourt says the life of Bouvia is “the test of all these other issues faced by persons with disabilities.” Her story is not necessarily suitable for partisan conclusions. In 1986, three years after the court addressed her for the first time for her desire, the judge canceled the previous decision. By that time, Bouvia was receiving treatments that would make death a painful starvation. She chose to survive, but she told the press that this was a practical decision and that she still prefers death.

In life yet, Davborte and Coleen Kasingham, one of the film’s producers, track down Bouvia’s sisters with the help of a private investigator. They learned that she died in 2014, that is, about a decade after what doctors had expected.

The interviews, in addition to the domestic video clips presented by the family, paint a picture of a woman who benefited from the best technological progress and support, and was an insatiable reader, seemed satisfied, and even happy. Instead of staying in the hospital, she was living in her own apartment, with a resident nurse.

“I would like to say that she was in a better position than she was in the 1980s,” says Davborte.

“Everyone wants to know, has it changed her opinion?” Her sister Theresa Castner says in life yet. She sighs and throws her hands. “Who knows the curse?

Bouvia’s sisters say she was happier when she got the most independence. She was crushed when she was discharged from chasing her dream to become a social worker, despite her university education – one of the accidents that seems to hurry her original request to die.

“I think there are many similarities between Elizabeth Bouvia and the arguments that people with disabilities offer [Maid]”In the documentary, he travels to Canada. Although the huge number of maids’ deaths there is linked to serious diseases, the activists and correspondents did so It was identified Cases and Practices Which calls for questioning regime protection barriers.

Patients and doctors who spoke to Davbort express their concern that the ultimate merciful murder requests have a great relationship with the limits of health care and social welfare systems in Canada, in addition to the fact that people with disabilities – including Bouvia, in some of its public statements – are often afraid To be a “burden” on their families or society. During a demonstration in Canada, one of the critics holds a banner saying: “Suicide with medical assistance: the cheapest health care in the world.”

Davinport says that defenders of death look at the matter as “controlling your life”, but “the decision is not a truly free choice in many cases. There are other factors dictated by external powers”, such as poverty, domestic support or long waiting lists for doctors. Specialists.

Davbort believes that enthusiasm to help death “has a great relationship to providing costs.” The Canadian parliamentary budget official, documentary notes, estimated that the expansion of a maid would do so Preserve 149 million dollars healthcare costs.

Some experts have described concerns about the maid as exaggerated. And they point out that most patients are people with terminal diseases and choose death Their special conditions. “You have to fulfill strict civil standards,” says Jooslin Downey, a law professor who studies the end of life policy, says, He said The Guardian in 2022.

It is difficult to know the exact number of Canadians who died through the MAID program, as well as the distribution of patients – partly due to the fact that the medical authorities in Ontario and Kepeck “are issued explicit instructions for doctors not to indicate death certificates to whether people have died due to compassionate killing “. ,, According to To the Associated Press.

According to the available data, about 3.5 % of people Who died Through a maid in Canada in 2022, they were people with chronic and non -chronic diseases.

“I am working in the health care system and I see people with severe chronic medical conditions all the time,” says Mona Jobta, a psychiatrist at the University of Montreal and the head of a committee studying the maid and mental illness. He said The Guardian last year. “The idea that 400 of them – in a country with a population of 40 million – have reached the point where they exhausted all the treatment options, and wanted to reach a maid, do not seem extreme for me.”

Davburt is concerned that society encourages people with disabilities or chronic medical conditions to look at life as not worthy of living. Life after the 14 -year -old Jerika Paulin is discussed in Wisconsin, which suffers from spinal muscle atrophy, which was allowed in 2016 to medically necessary treatment. she He died In the patronage of the elderly, after the community held a concert, the media celebrated on a large scale, called the “Last J.”.

Paulin’s mother has He said: “My only words for anyone wondering about this is that I love this girl with every cell in my being [and] Anyone will not allow all his mental strengths to suffer like it. However, a group of anti -mortgaged murder questioned, which has not yet died, in the “unilateral applause of its suicide”. Ask Local newspaper: “If she was a 14 -year -old girl who is sick with diabetes and rejects insulin, will the reactions be the same?”

“It seemed to me as if Jerca was surrounded by people who thought it would be better if she died … it should not be said to anyone, not to mention a child, that ending her life would be an attempt to kill her,” says Davinport, reviewing footage of the “Graduate Party”. Wonderful decision. “

I ask Davbort if adults with incurable diseases should be able to end their lives voluntarily. “In theory, I think suicide with medical help can be safe,” he says. But he feels that this is not safe in its nature in the “New Liberal” society where doctors and patients are exposed to enormous social and economic pressure. “Let’s make this discussion when He is security.”

Although some left leaflets have Express theyMost of the doubts about the merciful murder until now came from the disabled activists or ConservativeWhere the topic is dealt with as “a clip and dried in the liberal circles,” says Davbort. He is concerned that the progressive will reject his documentary as sarcastic or worrying.

“The” slippery slope “is considered as a promotion of fear.” “But there are cases where there is a correct argument.”