Last year, Canada’s Supreme Court passed legislation legalizing doctor-assisted suicide under specific circumstances. Since then, I have watched the news and social media explode with disability advocates lamenting the decision; there is an overwhelming majority of the disability community expressing fear for their lives, saying that this legislation slides the wrong way on a slippery slope –giving the medical community reason to make unilateral decisions regarding life saving measures provided to severely disabled individuals. There is fear that this legislation puts disabled people at risk; perhaps our lives will not be deemed worthy of saving, maybe doctors will decide to let us die because they don’t believe we have a quality of life worth living.

I do not understand. The assisted suicide legislation does not give doctors license murder people. Doctor assisted suicide requires explicit intent and consent from the person who is facing terminal illness. Consent is required on the part of the person who is dying. That’s why it’s called doctor-assisted suicide. The dying individual must ask for help to die. Without consent, you are no longer talking about doctor-assisted suicide; you’re talking about murder. To me that is a different discussion. I am not ashamed to support this legislation, and I am not ashamed to state that this legislation does not make me fear for my life.

If you’re against doctor-assisted suicide for fundamental reasons, moral reasons or religious beliefs, I respect that. I respect that issues like this will always be starkly divided and hotly debated. It is not my intent to try and prove my opinion to be superior. I only want to discuss how I believe this affects the disabled community, to point out that doctor-assisted suicide requires explicit consent under very strict circumstances. Without consent, we are no longer talking about the right of a terminally ill individual to die with dignity, if they choose. We’re talking about murder.

Having a disability is challenging and painful. Every day is a struggle. But this does not mean that life is not worth living. Many disabilities are not terminal. You cannot go to a doctor and say, “I do not like living with a disability. Can I die, please?” It doesn’t work like that. You live the life you’re given. Within the confines of assisted suicide, no one other than ourselves can decide what is livable versus what is not. And the option of ending anything is only available if we are already dying.

I believe that a person facing a terminal degenerative illness should have the right to ask for assistance to die when all quality of life has been exhausted. I believe that people facing a painful, slow, debilitating death deserve the right to choose to die with dignity, before the disease they are suffering from robs them of it. I believe that when life is no longer bearable and death is inevitable, people deserve the right to choose not to prolong their suffering beyond any positive quality of life. This choice does not, and will never apply to people with disabilities who are not facing death, and it will never apply to individuals who lack the mental competence to make such a decision soundly.

This legislation does not put disabled people at undue risk. The disabled community need not fear assisted suicide legislation. If we require treatment, doctors are legally obligated to do everything in their power to provide life-saving medical assistance.

There is a world of difference between doctor-assisted suicide and arbitrary unilateral decisions, blindly assigning quality-of-life based on an objective scale. There is a world of difference between a Supreme Court ruling on strictly controlled instances allowing doctor-assisted suicide and the actions of people like Robert Latimer.

Robert Latimer played God. He didn’t ask anyone. He didn’t ask his daughter Tracy what her quality of life was like. He looked at her contorted and spastic body, the result of having a severe form of cerebral palsy since birth, her mouth and vocal cords unable to form words and he decided that death was better. He euthanized her. He murdered her. She was facing several operations; he said in his court testimony that he could see the pain she was in, that dealing with the recovery from surgery would be unlivable, and he just wanted her pain to stop. He took her out to his truck while his wife and other children were at church, covered her face with a blanket, started the ignition and let the engine run. Robert Latimer killed his twelve-year-old-daughter and his defense is that he did it to end her suffering.

Murder disguised as euthanasia is still murder. No one asked Tracy if she wanted to die. She was killed. Her ‘suffering’ was a matter of conjecture. No one can presumptuously dictate how much suffering someone else endures. No one can definitively say how much suffering is too much. The only ones who can shed any light on the limits of suffering are those who endure it. Different people have different limits. For those who are facing death, people for whom there is no hope of recovery but only further decline, I believe they have the right to tell us when they have had enough, when there is no quality of life to offset the pain. They cannot change that they are dying, but being able to put limits on how much they should have to endure is a right they deserve. Doctor-assisted suicide is patient controlled; those who are dying are in control of how they die. Tracy was not dying. Tracy had no control. Tracy was powerless. Tracy was murdered.

I have cerebral palsy. The exact same form that Tracy did, in fact. I’m sure that to a great number of people my physical limitations, the physical pain that my disability causes me might make my life seem miserable. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it’s not. No one would ever dream of killing me because I have the power to verbally communicate, to tell people that I want to be here. The only difference between Tracy and I is that I have the ability to speak and she did not. Cerebral palsy can look nasty to a lot of people and in many ways it is very unforgiving. But as contorted as the body is, as droopy and drooling the body may be, there’s a person in there. There’s always a person inside. Cerebral palsy can be very physically brutal and learning disabilities often coexist, but it does not cause mental deficits or developmental delays. Robert Latimer carried out a ruthless and premeditated murder –he killed his own daughter and has said at every available opportunity that he would do it again. The saddest thing about this for me, having lived with this disability, is that I know Tracy was almost certainly fully cognizant of what was happening to her as she died. She knew that it was her father who put her in that truck and she was powerless to stop the life from draining out of her.

When I was sixteen, I was in biology class and the teacher was talking to us about carbon monoxide and carbon monoxide poisoning. She brought up Tracy Latimer and expressed mournfully that her father was being punished for simply “trying to help his daughter”. I put up my hand and said, “Excuse me Miss, but does that mean you want me to die too?”

The teacher –whom until this incident I actually quite liked- looked at me with mouth-agape shock, “What do you mean? I would never think such a thing,” she stammered.

“But Miss, Tracy Latimer had cerebral palsy. So do I. So if you’re going to stand there and tell us that he did nothing wrong by killing her, that he was a ‘good father’ for ending her pain, then you may as well buy a gun and point it at my head. You’d never kill me because I have the power to speak for myself. I can tell you that I want to be here. But if you take away my ability to speak, then Tracy and I are no different. If you’re condoning her death, then you’re condoning mine. And if that is really your opinion, then I don’t think I can be here.”

I left class. And I didn’t go back for the rest of the week.

Robert Latimer made a unilateral decision that his daughter’s life was not worth living. So he took it away from her and defended himself by saying that he did it out of love. Tracy may have been in pain, but she was not dying. Her response to stimuli may have been minimal, but she was not a hollowed out shell. He took her life from her because he decided that continuing to live was a fate worse than death. During his trial he was hailed as a loving father, while Tracy was continuously described as being little more than a family pet.

Robert Latimer is not a loving father. He is a monster. He was granted full parole in 2010. He gleefully made his rounds on the media circuit, saying that he did what any loving father would do, that he was shocked that it became such a big deal. I read the court transcripts from his trial and at one point his wife said, “If all fathers were like Bob, the world would be a better place.” I damn well hope not. I have the most loving father there is, and I’m pretty sure he wants me to outlive him, take the world by storm, be a stunning success and have a great life for myself.

Robert Latimer should be spending a life sentence rotting in prison for first-degree murder. But by some sick twist, he managed to get off with only a second-degree murder charge. This raises terrifying and sobering questions about how the quality of life of a person with a severe disability is seen by the highest court in our glorious and free land. So he’s out free, continuing to proclaim that if he had to, he’d kill his daughter again. And when the assisted suicide legislation was passed, Latimer applauded the courts, no doubt seeing it as a delayed justification of his actions.

Norman Kunc, an activist in the area of disability rights and awareness, says of Robert Latimer: “… the public’s support of Robert Latimer is founded upon the perception that life with a disability is a fate worse than death. I have cerebral palsy. This means that it usually takes me more time and energy to accomplish things; it does not mean I live a life of unmitigated suffering. Not only is this perception inaccurate, it also jeopardizes the lives of disabled Canadians.”

Kunc goes on to say that what frightens him is the possibility that should he suffer an accident and need life saving treatment, he fears that because of his disability doctors might question whether all attempts should be made to save his life. Commenting on Robert Latimer’s conviction of second-degree murder, he says: “I support the court’s decision because if Robert Latimer had received a reduced sentence it would have been a clear message to families and health professionals that they could feel justified and legally safe in prematurely ending the life of a disabled person. The thought of living in such a society, quite frankly, scares the hell out of me.”

The prospect of living in a society like that scares the hell out of me too. I wouldn’t want to live in a place where my life was thought to be worthless. It isn’t worthless. I intend to live my life as long as I can, wheelchair and all. Although Kunc and I would have to disagree on the matter of Latimer’s sentencing. I believe he should have been convicted of first-degree murder. He should never be a free man after what he did, and the fact that he is saddens me to the depths of my soul.

Even if doctor-assisted suicide legislation had been passed at the time of Tracy’s death, it would not have protected her father from facing legal consequences. The key word in this legislation is doctor-assisted suicide, and Robert Latimer is not a doctor. Tracy was only twelve at the time of her death and would likely have been too young to give binding consent. Even if she had, cerebral palsy is not terminal and there are many treatments–though intensive and potentially unpleasant- that she could have received to greatly improve her quality of life –like the several operations she was waiting for, which her father cast aside blithely. Most importantly, no one ever asked Tracy if she actually wanted to die; the decision was made for her that death must be better than the life she was leading.

So, in my mind, we do have something to fight for. Fight for Tracy, to convince the world that the life she never got to have was in fact a life –one which was callously and brutally taken from her by the one person she should have been able to trust to protect her. Robert Latimer did not protect his daughter. He killed her. Heartlessly. I do not know how sick and twisted you have to be in order to live with yourself, to say at every possible juncture that not only did you murder your daughter, but also that you see nothing wrong with what you did, and you would do it again.

People with disabilities are worried that a strict and controlled legislation offering the terminally ill the option to die with dignity is something that will start a downward spiral, and put us at risk for being murdered? No, it won’t. It will do exactly what it is meant for, which is to provide the terminally ill with the option of having a doctor’s assistance in dying when their illness has progressed to a point where life is not worth living. But that is the choice of the dying person to make. No one can do it for them. They have to decide it is what they want. A doctor can’t say, “You have stage four pancreatic cancer, maybe its time you started thinking about doctor-assisted suicide.” This is a choice that ultimately lies in the hands of the dying patient and no one else.

I live a happy life. I am severely disabled, but I do live a happy life. And you know what? If one day, God forbid I am faced with a terminal illness, I want the option of doctor-assisted suicide to be available to me. I’m not saying I would make that choice, but I want the legal right to choose.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, but even so I must admit that doctor-assisted suicide does not scare me. It’s the Robert Latimers of the world who concern me. There does come a point when you are severely, terminally, chronically ill, in the final stages of disease when death is no longer the scariest thing. I’ve read a few things comparing this new legislation with a downward spiral leading us back to the genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany. In my view, I am not ashamed to say that I disagree. We are not headed there because of doctor-assisted suicide for select terminally ill patients who choose this for themselves. It’s the actions of people like Robert Latimer that will send us barreling in that direction.

The doctor-assisted suicide legislation does not protect people with disabilities from the Robert Latimers of the world, nor does it prevent the heinous actions of those like him. We will always need to fight tirelessly to prove that our lives are worth living. There will always be people assuming that our lives are too painful, that we are too much of a burden -that no one would want to live our lives. We need to fight against people who dare to make unilateral decisions about our quality of life. We must ensure that it is well understood that life with a disability is not a fate worse than death. The issue of preventing someone from unilaterally deciding that our life is not worth living or saving is a separate battle. Even if the doctor-assisted suicide legislation were abolished, that does not make the Robert Latimers of the world disappear. It’s people like him we need to worry about, not a Supreme Court decision giving a small measure of autonomy and dignity to the terminally ill.

I am disabled and unafraid to support the Supreme Court’s legislation. In fact, I applaud it. My mother always taught me to pick my battles; I will not be outraged by legislation that affords a small amount of dignity to the terminally ill. No one wants to die; the patients whom this legislation will benefit are facing slow, painful and terrifying deaths. I find it hard to contemplate that someone would make this choice and end their lives prematurely, when they still have good days and something to live for. This decision is, by nature, a person’s last resort. I commend this legislation, which will provide even the smallest amount of solace to individuals facing imminent and unthinkable ends, easing the fear of dying slowly and painfully from disease.

I will always be unapologetically against Robert Latimer and his unspeakable actions. It is people like him that I will fight against every day of my life. No one has the right to assume that I suffer or how I suffer, to arbitrarily decide what my life is worth.

I first heard about what happened to Tracy Latimer when I was about twelve, and it took me several years to fully understand the implications of her death. I use my writings, my opinions, any platforms I have to express myself, to advocate and educate my friends and the public. Tracy Latimer’s life was barbarically taken from her at the hands of the man she should have been able to trust to protect her. Instead he killed her. Every time I have a chance to advocate, I don’t just do it for myself or for the benefit of my friends or the community at large. I am not just advocating for myself; I am advocating for Tracy and so many others like her. I have to be the voice of so many others who cannot speak for themselves. I have to be a voice for Tracy.

So, the Supreme Court’s legislation on doctor-assisted suicide does not bother me or make me fear for my life. People like Robert Latimer and his actions -that is what I have difficulty living with. His daughter had no voice and could not speak for herself. Someone has to speak for her. Doctor-assisted suicide allows a choice that will afford someone the opportunity to die with dignity when they are in the end stages of a terminal illness. A disability is not a terminal illness; doctor-assisted suicide is no danger to us.  Tracy died brutally at the hands of her own father and was powerless to stop it. Her life and her dignity were taken from her because her father decided her life was worthless.

Let the terminally ill die with dignity. Let us not worry that this legislation is an all-encompassing death certificate for anyone with a disability, because it isn’t. Fight the Robert Latimers of the world; let us show just how valuable our lives are. Let us never allow for unilateral decisions concluding that we have no quality of life.  Let the dying die with whatever morsel of dignity that can be afforded to them and let those of us with disabilities live our lives with dignity and to the fullest, everyday we can, for Tracy.