Category: Euthanasia

Groups make effort to protect physicians’ conscience rights

 The Catholic Register

Deborah Gyapong, Canadian Catholic News

OTTAWA – Doctors’ conscience rights are threatened by a proposed policy of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) that may force them to refer patients for morally problematic procedures, warn some physicians’ organizations.

The CPSO has given a Feb. 20 deadline for input into the policy that would force physicians to refer patients for procedures such as abortion and assisted suicide (the Supreme Court on Feb. 6 struck down prohibitions against assisted suicide) against their consciences. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan is also considering similar changes to its policy, with a deadline of March 6 for public input.

The Christian Medical and Dental Society (CMDS) Canada has been working closely with the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Societies in rallying opposition to the proposed changes.

“The proposed policy demands that doctors refer for, and in some cases actually perform, procedures like birth control, abortion and even euthanasia,” said CMDS executive director Larry Worthen. “Physicians would have to perform these procedures when the regulator considers them to be ‘urgent or otherwise necessary to prevent imminent harm, suffering and/or deterioration.’  . . . [Full Text]

 

Euthanasia cases leap 73% at cautioned clinic

NL Times

Janene Van Jaarsveldt

The Levenseindekliniek helped 232 people with their request to die in 2014, 98 more than in 2013. The clinic also had 1,035 requests for euthanasia last year, substantially more than the previous year, the Levenseindekliniek announced.

The Levenseindekliniek received two reprimands last year. The Regional Euthanasia Review Committee (RTE) reprimanded the clinic last month for the euthanasia of a woman with severe tinnitus (ringing in the ears), without performing a psychiatric examination. In August the clinic was also reprimanded for assisting in the suicide of an elderly woman without sufficient motivation. . . [Full Text]

 

York Region health care professionals offer mixed views on doctor-assisted suicide

yorkregion.co

Lisa Queen

Let the soul searching begin.

True, the Supreme Court of Canada delivered a unanimous and historic decision last Friday, striking down the country’s ban on doctor-assisted suicide for consenting and severely ill adult patients. It gave Ottawa a year to enact new legislation.

And true, an opinion poll last fall indicated 84 per cent of Canadians believe “a doctor should be able to help someone end his or her life if the person is a competent adult who is terminally ill, suffering unbearably and repeatedly asks for assistance to die.”

But the issue is striking closer to home for health care providers, who, some day in the very near future, could be asked to help patients end their lives, according to Dr. Cindy So and Jonathan Breslin. . . [Full Text]

 

Dying Dutch: Euthanasia Spreads Across Europe

Newsweek

Winston Ross

In one of the last photographs my family took of my grandmother, she looks as if she’s been in a fistfight. Jean Bass Tinsley is lying in a hospital bed in Athens, Georgia, wearing a turquoise button-up shirt and staring blankly at the camera. A bandage obscures her fractured skull, along with the bridge of her bloodied nose. She is 91 years old.

My grandmother essentially did this to herself. In June 2013, she fell out of her wheelchair headfirst, after ignoring her caregivers’ warnings not to get out of bed without help. Earlier that year, she’d broken both of her hips, in separate falls. Before that, her pelvis-all while trying to do what for most of her life she’d managed just fine on her own: walk.

In her last year, dementia crept into my grandmother’s mind. The staff at her long-term-care facility plotted ways to protect her from herself. It’s against the law in Georgia to restrain patients in such facilities, so they lowered her bed to the floor and put a pad down next to it. They even installed an alarm that went off if she left her mattress. My grandmother disabled the alarm, moved the pad and freed herself, repeatedly. In the end, she was both too weak and too strong. [Full text]

 

Archbishop of Toronto: trust in physician regulators is misplaced

Sean Murphy*

Cardinal Thomas Collins, Catholic Archbishop of Toronto, warns that the Supreme Court was unwise to trust Colleges of Physicians to protect physicians who are unwilling to provide assisted suicide or euthanasia for reasons of conscience.  He noted that the College of Physicians of Ontario is planning to force objecting physicians to refer patients to colleagues willing to kill them or help them commit suicide, thus making the objectors “accomplices” in the killing. His comments were part of an extensive critique of the Supreme Court of Canada ruling in Carter v. Canada. [LifeSite News]