Robert Latimer was granted day parole recently. His actions have opened an ethical and moral question that many Canadians, me included, are finding difficult to answer. Robert Latimer loved his daughter; what he didn’t love was watching her struggle to live and knowing that the situation would only become worse. So, in one final act of love, he killed her by placing her in the cab of his truck and then pumping carbon monoxide from the vehicle inside. Mr. Latimer never denied that he killed his daughter and says that he does not resent the law that jailed him for the murder.
It’s what Mr. Latimer does want that causes the moral dilemma. He wants a jury to decide if his past action was right or wrong. Speaking to Don Butler of the Ottawa Citizen, Mr. Latimer said that, “…a jury should be able to consider whether what I did was right or wrong. And I’ve never had a jury like that.” He feels that “Canadians want situations like ours dealt with honestly,” but he insists that he is not lobbying for anyone else’s case, only for his own. What he is asking, in fact, is whether it is morally right to take the life of someone who is in constant pain and suffering.
How can that question be answered? Advocates for the severally disabled state that everyone has a right to live and that every life has a potential. Is this answer enough, however, for those parents and caregivers who know that the child, or adult, they look after will never communicate verbally, never be out of pain, never be able to live independently? What will happen to that individual when parents become elderly and unable to provide the required care? What happens when caregivers leave? Yes, there are institutions, but that alternative is repugnant to most parents.
That leaves medication. Tracy Latimer had lots of medication. It has been suggested that the Latimers could have used other medications for Tracy, but Robert insists that such an option was not available because pain-relieving drugs interfered with her anti-seizure medication. There was a choice: allow Tracy to live in continual pain, or to watch her have massive seizures.
The chronic worry and fatigue of the Latimers must be considered, also. Worry and fatigue are not excuses for murder, but they do influence the decisions of those who are coping with an unsolvable problem. When an individual is exhausted and perceives that there are few options available to them, the feelings of desperation and entrapment grow, often to unmanageable proportions. It is at this juncture that monstrous choices may be made.
There is another side of the question, and it is important that it be stated. Heidi L. Janz, in an Edmonton Journal article dated March 15th, stated that we, as Canadians, have learned very little from the Latimer saga. She places much of the blame for this lack of understanding on the media, saying that, “…most media stories about the Latimer case were, and are, constructed around the dichotomy of Tracy as a pain-ridden subhuman being versus Robert as a long-suffering, devoted parent.” Ms. Janz feels that Tracy’s day-to-day life actually belies this picture, but it is the public’s willingness to accept the portrayal that is the real obstacle in bringing change for disabled people.
Ms. Janz questions the perception that Tracy was in constant pain with the observation that a person in a “vegetative state,” as the Latimer’s lawyer portrayed Tracy, cannot feel pain. She was also well enough to attend school two days before her death, which raises the question of how much pain afflicted Tracy.
The second question raised by Janz concerns cerebral palsy, itself. She argues that, as a society, we view any type of disability as a curtailment of a normal life span. Not only are the disabled saddled with a “poor quality of life,” they are also doomed to a shortened life. We tend to roll both conditions up into a dangerous ball, assuming that “the quality of life that she experienced was so poor that she may as well have been dying – or dead.”
All these perceptions, maintains Janz, allow us, as a society, and the media, as our information gatherers, to portray Tracy, and the disabled as a whole, in a shadowed and ignorant light. She states that, “If the value of a person’s life is ultimately contingent on a person’s ability to walk, talk, and feed themselves, what are we to do with the rest of our children with severe disabilities? And what of the growing numbers of our parents with dementia?”
It is up to us to examine these concerns, and the pressures under which caregivers of the disabled labour. We have to ask ourselves what we would do in the same situation as the Latimers found themselves, and how we can bring about change so that we can arrive at a different answer.
