Al Roth

And there's a line in there which says –

you know, the objection to medical aid in dying is much stronger than capital punishment or war, right?

Because she thinks there might be reasons for capital punishment and war, but the Catholic Church is quite clear that it thinks there's never justification for medical aid in dying.

Although, I mean, the Catholic Church

is also at the forefront of providing hospice care.

They don't think people necessarily have to die after months of agony.

They're willing to try to take care of people who are dying to ease the agony, but they don't like shortening life.

He did.

He thinks it's not justified.

And so opponents of medical aid in dying are no doubt now looking for a case that can be appealed to the Supreme Court.

And the fact that we have a Supreme Court which has two conservative members very much committed that medical aid in dying should be illegal makes me skeptical about what I would otherwise notice, which is that medical aid in dying has a lot of appeal to a society like ours where advances in medicine have not...

ended death by any means, but have allowed the dying process to sometimes go on for a long time in uncomfortable, undignified, painful ways.

It's hard to get the actual numbers, but I think there's no question that there's a lot of

covert medical aid in dying in places where it's not legal.

And the reason is that the same medicines that relieve pain can also shorten life.

When I talk to doctors, many of them know of cases that they think of as having been medical aid in dying.

And there have been some papers, there's one from Australia, that says that when you survey doctors privately, there's quite a bit of medical aid in dying.

So I think that the high numbers in Canada that are causing some backlash against the Canadian laws

Incidentally, the large majority of those are elderly, late-stage cancer patients.

I think that a lot of those big numbers come from the fact that there was medical aid in dying before it was legal in Canada, just because when you have bony metastases from cancer, you're in pain.