Early this October, Gloria Taylor passed away of natural causes at the age of 64. Many people will not recognize this woman’s name and, indeed, under normal circumstances her passing would have remained unnoticed by the media’s radar. But in her dying days, Gloria Taylor became something of a symbol for a movement that is important to many Canadians.

Three years ago Taylor was diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a deteriorative ailment more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In most cases, ALS sufferers experience their muscles weaken and atrophy until they can no longer initiate or control voluntary movement. Many will develop difficulties speaking and swallowing. In the late stages of the disease, it is not uncommon for those afflicted with ALS to need machines to help them eat, breathe, and excrete their digestive wastes.

It horrified Taylor to think she might die in such a fashion. If she was to face death she wanted the choice to face it on her own terms so that she might pass from this world with what she felt constituted dignity. Unfortunately, Canada’s laws regarding euthanasia would bar her from doing so. So Taylor challenged those laws, taking her case all the way to the highest court in British Columbia. The judges in the B.C. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in Taylor’s favour, deciding that Canada’s ban on physician-assisted suicide is unconstitutional, granting Taylor an exemption from the law, and the right to seek a peaceful end at her own discretion.

Quite predictably, our ideologically-driven Conservative government would not let such a decision stand, and appealed Taylor’s case. The government also sought to prevent Taylor from being euthanized during the appeal process, which was expected to take until next spring to resolve, quite possibly enough time that Taylor’s disease might have progressed to the stages she feared to suffer through. It is almost poetic that nature saw fit to grant­ Taylor the quick end that our government wished to deny her.

But Gloria Taylor’s cause lives on. Thankfully, in the wake of Taylor’s passing, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association has agreed to take up her court fight, so her crusade need not die with her. She is, after all, only one of many Canadians who wish not to die caught in the throes of a painful disease, or spend their last days on this planet wracked by cognitive dissonance that would leave them a shadow of their former selves. So the court case will proceed, and the debate will continue.

The argument in favour of legalized euthanasia is fairly straightforward, I think. In a free society, a person has the right to live free from pain and suffering. Forcing a person to carry on living against their will under such intense duress is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment, which humanity has been principally opposed to since the thirteenth century, when the Magna Carta was drafted. Simple enough, one would think.

But of course, nothing is ever that simple. Traditionally, there are two strains of argument in opposition to legalized euthanasia. The first is the religious argument, the idea that god created all human life and only god has the right to take it away. Essentially, there is a sect of religious fundamentalists who believe that doctors would be playing god if they took a patient’s life before the spirit leaves the body of its own volition. Of course, the idea that doctors might be playing god by prolonging a patient’s life artificially through the use of life support machines never seems to dawn on these fundamentalists. With all due respect to religious fundamentalists, that archaic argument should have been euthanized long ago.

Then there is the slippery slope argument. Many anti-euthanasia activists are quick to point to the Netherlands as an example of how horrible things can get after a nation adopts a policy of legalized euthanasia. The problem is these anti-euthanasia activists have a habit of cherry picking data and playing on people’s fears with misleading statistics and terminology. Occasionally they will even outright lie. During the last race for the American Republican Party leadership, Rick Santorum stated that, in the Netherlands, elderly people walk around wearing “Do Not Euthanize Me” bracelets, that ten percent of all deaths are euthanizations, and that half of those euthanizations are involuntary. These claims are not correct.

Of course, Santorum is an extreme case. Most anti-euthanasia activists are more rational and, indeed, some of their arguments even carry some merit. However, I think that in some cases they will still mislead you about some things to prove their point. They may be quick to point out that euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands are on the rise, but not bother pondering if this might be in correlation with an aging population and the fact that baby boomers are entering into a phase of their lives when many debilitating diseases take hold. They will talk about the people who are euthanized in the early stages of dementia, who still seem to be mostly healthy, but will ignore the fact that these people were of sound mind when they made this choice, and in full knowledge that their minds would not have been sound enough to legally make such a decision in the later stages of their disease.

But the entire Netherlands argument is moot anyway because we don’t live in the Netherlands, we live in Canada. We will craft our own legislation, with our own safeguards to ensure that the vulnerable are not exploited.

Every day terminally ill Canadian citizens like Gloria Taylor are forced to suffer needlessly. While she did not face the kind of death she had feared, we can’t keep turning a deaf ear to the pleas for help of many people in pain, just for fear of some slippery slope that might or might not lie beyond the horizon.