As assisted dying broadens, countries wrestle with new ethical lines
Federico Redondo Sepúlveda and his mother, Martha Sepúlveda, were inseparable.
So when she fought for her right to an assisted death – to relieve her suffering from a progressive neurological disorder that she was diagnosed with in 2018 – he was shaken. She’d only heard that Colombia allowed euthanasia because Mr. Redondo happened to share with her the topic of his law school class that day.
As she pushed for her own access – after the Constitutional Court of Colombia extended the right to those like her without an immediate terminal prognosis in 2021 – he would avoid the subject, leaving the table to make a call or take out the trash. “It’s always been just me and my mom,” says Mr. Redondo, an only child. “I’d say things like, ‘Ma, you’re just going to leave me on my own? You have so many things that are worth living for!’”
Yet over time, as her illness progressed and a new reality dawned, he came to reframe discomfort from her perspective, from a woman whose core value she had long imparted to her son: “to live was to decide.” On Jan. 8, 2022, she became one of the country’s first citizens to die in a case with a nonterminal prognosis, her son at her side.
A month earlier, in Toronto, another mother and son were facing a voluntary death, but this time it was the son who wanted to die.
Sharon Danley says her son, Matthew Main, was diagnosed at birth with multiple conditions, underwent dozens of surgeries as a child, and complained of chronic physical pain into adulthood. He was eligible for Canada’s medical assistance in dying, known as MAiD, after the law was amended in 2021 to include those whose deaths aren’t “reasonably foreseeable.”
Her son had told her in 2020 about his intention to take advantage of MAiD, Ms. Danley says. She was against it from the start. “When someone tells you that they’re going to be euthanized, it’s like it brings you to your knees. You can’t fathom it, and that waiting for the day to happen is excruciating.”
Their relationship, already contentious, deteriorated so
