Woman with terminal cancer writes powerful letter on medically-assisted death

Margaret-Rose Uveryhas terminal cancer, and wrotea letter to MP Kelly Block after receiving a survey on medically-assisted dying.

Uvery lives in Hafford, Sask., which is part of Block's riding. She received a letter from the MP that asked:"Do you believe physician-assisted suicide should be legal in Canada?"

Block's letter then said,"I believe that in a just a generous society all human life is to be welcomed, loved and protected by law from conception to natural death."

Uvery said she agrees with most of that except the natural death part.

She wrote this letter in response:

Dear Ms. Block,

The government has no business in our bedrooms, bathrooms, nor dying rooms.

Most politicians are unqualified to conceptualize, much less authorize, anything of serious consequence. Hence the legal professionals among us are certainly required to ponder and therefore determine competent justice.

As someone who watched my late mother suffer as a battered woman, a victim of the soft science of psychiatry, mis-diagnosed with manic depression, when she in fact had multiple sclerosis, then further was forced to be kept alive by the medi-scare system, until her very unnatural death at 47 years old.

I am a so-called recurring metastatic breast cancer survivor. Eight years now. Currently stage four palliative. Thus as a person who faces her own mortality on almost a daily basis, let me assure you that the last thing I need is for you or anyone else to orchestrate my expiration.

As the lovely and so tragic Sue Rodriguez pleaded in 1994, whose life is this anyway. I wrote a song to honour her.

Sincerely,

Margaret-Rose Uvery