Writer Emily Standfield drew a challenging assignment recently for Broadview magazine: write about Betty Sanguin, who chose to hasten her death as part of a religious rite performed inside the church she loved for many years, amid a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Here’s the full headline: “Manitoba’s first medically assisted death in a church was an ‘intimate’ ceremony — Betty Sanguin spent her last day with family and friends at Churchill Park United.” And this is the overture:

At around noon on March 9, Betty Sanguin arrived at her church, Churchill Park United in Winnipeg, on a stretcher.

“The moment we rolled her in … and sat her up in her recliner, she lit up like a Christmas tree,” Lynda Sanguin-Colpitts, one of Sanguin’s daughters, recalls. “I hadn’t seen that much life in her eyes, so much joy [in a long time]. And honestly I think part of it was just being in the church.”

But this was no ordinary church service. Sanguin chose to die in the sanctuary that day. 

Let’s stipulate some points up front:

First of all, Standfield is an editorial intern. Also, it’s crucial that Broadview, a publication affiliated with the United Church of Canada, has many ideological commitments and states them explicitly on its website. Here are some quotes:

— “Broadview’s values include LGBTQ2 inclusion, environmental sustainability and ethical investing, as well as increasing the presence of diverse contributors.”

— “In October 2020, we pledged to have one-third BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) staff and freelance contributors by 2025, and we’ll check in on our progress annually. Our governing board has also committed to achieving a similar target among its 11 members.”

— “In our writing, we refer to diverse communities with their preferred cases and spellings. For example, we capitalize ‘B’ in ‘Black’ and ‘I’ in ‘Indigenous,’ and use our Indigenous writers’ and subjects’ preferred spellings for Indigenous nations.”

— Then there is this final quote: “Broadview acknowledges that our office is on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishnaabe and the Huron-Wendat, the original owners and custodians of this land. Today, this place is home to many including a diverse urban Indigenous community of Inuit, First Nations and Métis.”

To her credit, Standfield never uses the journalist’s cliché of “controversial,” which would be a bland understatement for a woman choosing to end her own life inside a church sanctuary.

What kind of journalism are we talking about in this case?

It’s clear that this news report reflects Broadview’s liberal Protestant perspective, and in that respect Standfield delivered what was expected.

Nevertheless, the report — which relies on descriptions by two of Sanguin’s daughters — suffers from unexplored questions, missing details and secondhand accounts of what detractors said about the “crossing over” ceremony, as the family calls it.

Here are some rather basic questions left unanswered by Standfield’s report. These are the kinds of questions one would expect to be answered in any fact-based journalism account, even at an advocacy publication:

* What was Sanguin’s age?

* In addition to no longer being able to talk, what other crippling effects of ALS had Sanguin experienced?

* Was there any catalyst in addition to ALS that made Sanguin decide to choose Medical Assistance in Dying?

* Did Sanguin — or her clergy — wrestle with any ethical or theological doubts about euthanasia, arising from traditional Christian teaching against suicide?

* What steps are taken in the “procedure,” as Standfield refers to the act five times?

* This is important: “Eventually, everyone was asked to leave the sanctuary and Sanguin met with the MAiD team,” Sanguin writes. Why this clearing of the room? If a chosen time of death is “the most beautiful and humane and compassionate way to die,” as daughter Lynda Sanguin-Colpitts describes it, shouldn’t this step of dying be sacred and shared?

* Standfield writes that the Rev. Dawn Rolke, minister of Churchill Park United Church, “has received messages telling her that [leaders of] Churchill Park United should close their doors and that they should be ashamed of their actions.” She adds that Rolke “was also surprised that many critics were most offended by the procedure taking place in the church, instead of the procedure itself.”

Thus, one final question: Did Rolke have any letters or voicemail to back this characterization of the protests? Is it logical that people would criticize only the sacrilege of the death ritual’s setting while considering euthanasia unobjectionable?

FIRST IMAGE: From Alberto Biscalchin/Flickr