Administering Requests for Death, Between Love and Justice
Based on an ethnographic study on assistance in dying in Quebec conducted between 2015 and 2019, the article explores what happens during the administration of a request for medical aid in dying (MAiD). Through the Act Respecting End-of-Life Care, which came into force in 2015, the Quebec National Assembly legalized MAiD, a form of euthanasia. The study is based on observations of the MAiD application administration process (meetings between professionals, evaluation, administration, debriefing groups) and interviews conducted with professionals, family members and an applicant at a hospital in the Greater Montreal area. The author shows how the embedding of MAiD in care relies on an ethic in action that allows those involved in these situations to meet the four conditions for the possibility of this practice that he identifies. To do so, they navigate between two regimes of action conceptualized by Luc Boltanski, a regime of love that calls for the immediate relief of perceived suffering in a singular person and a regime of justice that involves establishing equivalences between a variety of situations. The article identifies the practical maxims, related to those two regimes, that enable the actors to reach an agreement on the possibility of administering MAiD.