Media coverage.

Following the publicity concerning the three cases, Toronto's Globe and Mail immediately went into high gear in support of legal euthanasia. In an editorial of September 29, the writer stated that "there are many good reasons for a law permitting assisted suicide for the terminally ill," as long as the person has some control over the circumstances of his death. The only other thing needed, he ventured, is a public system of safeguards (although these were not spelled out). The editorialist did state that compassion on its own does not justify an assisted suicide. (In the Fariala case, the media focused on a weeping mother who was portrayed as "compassionate," "a gentle woman with a heart of gold whose life spiraled downward after her child became ill." It looked eerily as if there were two patients, mother and son, neither of whom was capable of making rational life decisions at the time. But the attention was focused entirely on the mother.)

In a column in the Toronto Star (October 4, 2004) Rosie DiManno, who ordinarily is no friend of the pro-life movement, denounced euthanasia. She wrote lovingly of her father dying in a Toronto hospital. She was outraged that people would contemplate hurrying their loved ones into death. ("Do not push gently into that good night.") She called it a trendy issue, "morally hollow," where "merciful death is but a shallow platitude" used by those who want to be relieved of the burden of caring for someone who is desperately ill, or infirm, or frail. In the Fariala case, she saw the mother as misguided in helping her son to commit suicide, calling it both a crime and a murder.