It would be wrong to deny assisted suicide to people whose request is driven mostly by poverty or other ‘unjust’ conditions, according to a new paper by two University of Toronto bioethicists.

Not allowing ‘medical assistance in dying’ (MAID) to people when bad circumstances show no short-term chance of improving would only cause further harm to them, Kayla Wiebe, a PhD candidate in philosophy, and bioethicist Amy Mullin, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, write in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

“To force people who are already in unjust social circumstances to have to wait until those social circumstances improve, or for the possibility of public charity that sometimes but unreliably occurs when particularly distressing cases become public, is unacceptable,” they wrote.