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The wrinkle, and perhaps the tragedy, in this case is that the woman, identified only as MV, has autism and ADHD, lives with her parents and has never had an independent life. Her father, identified as WV, argued that her condition is mental, not physical, so she doesn’t qualify for MAID under current law. Her condition, he said, led to her being “obsessed� with MAID.

To cut to the chase: Justice Colin Feasby of Alberta’s Court of King’s Bench this week tossed out an injunction that WV had obtained to stop his daughter from accessing MAID. The effect of his ruling is that she can end her life, though the judge stayed his ruling for 30 days to allow time for appeal.

and along the way a few things about the MAID system as it’s currently being used become uncomfortably clear.

One is that the court opened the way for MV to end her life without knowing why. The woman didn’t present any evidence about her condition, and indeed didn’t have to.

The only medical evidence was submitted by her father and it’s decidedly underwhelming. A specialist’s report from 2021 confirmed a diagnosis of autism and ADHD but found only such symptoms as “a propensity for tripping and falling,� “numbness and tingling in her hands and feet,� and “difficulty in going up stairs for the past five years.� Overall, the specialist described her as “looks well and not in distress.�

The father also argued that the way his daughter was authorized for MAID was problematic. She applied twice and both times the doctors involved disagreed on its appropriateness in her case. However, the “MAID Navigator� assigned to guide her through the system got around that on the second try by getting the doctor who approved her request the first time to act as a tiebreaker.

The law says physicians involved in making those decisions must be independent. Justice Feasby writes that relying on a doctor who had already decided the woman was eligible for MAID to cast the deciding vote on her fate “is contrary to the requirement of independence.� I’d go further: it smacks of doctor shopping, consulting physicians until you get the decision you want. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

Justice Feasby says that’s a serious issue for a court to look at, but not his court in the context of an urgent request about a temporary injunction.

And overall, he says none of this is really up to him. The bottom line is that “Parliament has put its trust in doctors and nurse practitioners and it is not for the court to second guess that choice.�

On the fundamental issue, he rules, the harm to MV’s parents caused by her death (grief at losing a daughter) does not outweigh the harm that would be caused to her by preventing her from ending her life through MAID. That, he writes, “goes to the core of her being. An injunction would deny MV the right to choose between living and dying with dignity.�

That’s the law, according to Justice Feasby, but as a society we must decide whether this is really the system we want. On the face of it, a young woman with a psychological condition has decided to end her life as the result of a process that a judge has serious questions about. But the court decided it has no role in overseeing what’s happening, and apparently no one else does either.

Some will see no problem here. For them, “personal autonomy� is all that counts. I’d say this case underlines the need for some kind of oversight on what are, quite literally, decisions of life and death.