Category: Euthanasia

Calgary-area UCP MLAs say they won’t support conscience rights bill

Calgary Herald

 Zach Laing

A pair of Calgary MLAs say they won’t support a controversial private-member’s bill meant to extend protection for physicians’ conscience rights.

Introduced in the legislature last week by Peace River MLA and UCP backbencher Dan Williams, Bill 207 would prevent patients from submitting a professional complaint or suing a health-care worker for failing to provide a service if medical staff objects to it. The bill would also add “conscientious beliefs” as grounds protected from discrimination in the Alberta Human Rights Act. . . [Full text]

Freedom of conscience in health care: “an interesting moral swamp”?

Responding to Caplan AL. Whose rights come first: Doctors or patients? Medscape, 5 November, 2019

Sean Murphy*

“Whose rights come first?” asks Professor Arthur Caplan in a recent Medscape column. “Doctors’ or patients?”

“You can’t have physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and social workers saying they are not going to do legally allowed medicine or standard-of-care treatment because it violates their rights,” says Professor Caplan. He does suggest that refusal can be allowed if the objector can find a substitute “and it doesn’t disrupt the ER or the organization of healthcare delivery.” . . . Full text

Conscience rights battle wages on several fronts

The Catholic Register

Michael Swan

As Alberta debates a private member’s bill to protect conscience rights for doctors and other health care providers, Ontario’s government is saying little about a lack of protection for doctors forced to provide referrals for assisted suicide, abortion and other procedures. . . [Full text]

UCP MLA denies conscience rights bill limits health care access

Backbench MLA faces continued questions about potential implications of Bill 207

CBC News

Michelle Bellefontaine

The Alberta UCP MLA behind a controversial bill on conscience rights for health care providers says the bill isn’t intended to cut access to services like abortion and medical assistance in dying as critics have charged.

“I feel there is some misinformation about what the bill is trying to do and what it does do,” Peace River MLA Dan Williams told reporters Friday.   

“I want to be absolutely clear. This bill in no way categorically limits access to any services. That was not my intent, that is not what the bill does.” . . . [Full text]

Euthanasia: David Seymour’s End of Life Choice Bill passes final reading

Newshub

Zane Small

ACT leader David Seymour’s End of Life Choice Bill has passed its final reading in Parliament four years after it was first put in the ballot box.

The Bill – which will let terminally ill adults with less than six months left to live access assisted dying or ‘euthanasia’ – passed its final reading on Wednesday in a conscience vote, with 69 votes for it and 51 against.

But just because the legislation passed its final reading, it won’t actually become law unless the public vote to pass it at the 2020 general election. . . .[Full text] [End of Life Choice Act (2017): Protection of Conscience Provisions]