By Jeff Woolaver

In Nova Scotia, the Crown prosecutor is currently pursuing a charge of manslaughter against a Halifax respirologist accused of hastening the death of a terminally ill cancer patient in the Intensive Care Unit of the Victoria General Hospital in November, 1996.

The Crown contends that a provincial court wrongly dismissed the charge of murder against Dr. Nancy Morrison. Morrison, a widely respected and trusted member of the ICU, was originally charged with first-degree murder for allegedly administering lethal doses of the drugs nitroglycerine and potassium chloride to Paul Mills who, at the request of his immediate family, had been removed from life-support systems and had determined that no attempts be made at resuscitation when his pulse, irretrievably assailed by the ravages of cancer and infecton, inevitably ceased.

The legal wrangling aside, however, there are much graver and futher-reaching moral and ethical issues at stake in the case. In any such case, however rarely are they pursued.

Opponents and critics argue that the pardoning of any such act tends to lay the foundations for a very slippery slope upon which the precedence is set for a potentially widening scope of physician-assisted euthanasia: common malcontents and sufferers of chronic depression may begin seeking a similar end. Lobby groups representing the disabled further contend that such sanctions tend to endanger the life of any disabled patient under medical supervision.

Any such arguments, non sequiturs, however, must rely exclusively on speculation. In the Netherlands, where courts as a rule will not pursue physician-assisted suicide so long as the deceased is deemed to have been in suffering enough to warrant death as an appropriate and suitable alternative, there has been no such increase in unmitigated mercy killing.

In Canada, however, such compassionate acts of deliveranc remain indistinct from murder, cold-blooded and first-degree.

Furthermore, under existing Canadian law there remains no stated boundary or definable limit as to the extent attending physicians can proceed in alleviating the suffering of the terminally ill, by way of increasing dosages of pain-killing medication, even if those dosages tend to accelerate the time of death, once a patient is consensually removed from life-support systems.

Like any bold new phase of life-altering legislation, changing the existing law will require a degree of acclimation.

Human beings fear God, and man playing God, as much as they fear assailing the final playing out of the fight for self-preservation.

The cold reality, however, is that the need for an amendment to existing Canadian law, with each succeeding assisted-suicide case which rears its ugly head in our nation, can no longer be ignored. Prosecution in Nova Scotia would not now be pursuing a charge of manslaughter against Dr. Morrison if it did not believe it had a good chance of conviction.

Should a jury of Morrison's peers indeed return a charge of manslaughter against th Halifax respirologist, this may, at long last, be just the catastrophe, the miscarriage of justice, of right-minded logic, that may finally behoove Parliament to take action and ask the question, "In what way does prolonging the agony of the irretribably lost and in acute pain serve the public interest to prosecute those who assist in ending it?"