Category: Commentary

Assisted dying: When what if becomes what is

Calgary Herald

Peter Stockland

If tone and body language are at all reliable indicators, within the coming year, Canada’s Supreme Court will strike down current laws against assisted suicide.

The justices hearing the Carter case on Oct. 15 gave no visual or audible signs of sympathy to the federal government’s argument that the laws ruled constitutional in the 1993 Rodriguez case should still be deemed constitutional 20 years later.

By contrast, those on the bench appeared eagerly engaged by the position of opposing counsel that Criminal Code prohibitions against counselling suicide and assisting suicide violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Justice Rosalie Abella were particularly active in querying the “blanket prohibition” of the current law, and its contribution to the “suffering” of those who want help to kill themselves.

All those who assert with certainty how any of this will translate are, of course, themselves unreliable. No one outside of the court itself will know before we all do. But the tableau last week at least gave credibility to the “what ifs” of Canada suddenly opening the legal door to assisted suicide. . . [Full text]

Defend Integrity

The Catholic Register

Editorial

Doctors hold a favoured place in society because they are seen as models of compassion and integrity. They are admired as healers and moral leaders, virtuous people, widely respected. If you can’t trust your doctor, who can you trust?

But there is a legitimate concern that a current undertaking by the Ontario College of Physicians could lead to erosion of that stature. The College is conducting a review of its human-rights-code policy amid some pressure to purge religious freedom and conscience rights from everyday medical practice. First step is an ongoing consulting process that is seeking professional and public input.

Here is The Register’s input: leave the current policy alone and do nothing to undermine a doctor’s autonomy to assert their Charter rights of freedom of religion and conscience. [Full Text]

Ethics should colour doctor’s decisions

Wrong to ask MDs to leave their values at their exam room doors

Hamilton Spectator

Reproduced with permission

Lea Singh

In a recent column, Martin Regg Cohn throws spears in all directions as he attacks doctors who refuse to prescribe or refer for birth control pills. Cohn wants the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, which is reviewing its human rights guidelines, to clamp down on these doctors and force them to participate in treatments they consider unethical or risk losing their jobs.

First off, Cohn rejects the possibility that there could be sound medical judgment behind the decision not to prescribe birth control pills. He is wrong; birth control is not Tylenol. Popular pain relievers are very safe when used according to directions; their main danger comes from accidental overdose.

In contrast, a regular “safe” daily dose of birth control pills will nearly triple a woman’s risk of deadly blood clots, and newer pills like Yasmin further double or triple that risk. Last year, Yasmin was linked to the deaths of 23 Canadian women. This year, a major French report revealed that blood clots caused by birth control pills have killed about 20 French women per year since 2000. Many women who survived their blood clots have been left paralyzed, blind and otherwise disabled.

Yes, pregnancy also increases blood clot risks. Blood clots kill more pregnant women than any other cause in the developed world. But pregnancy only lasts nine months, while many women are on the pill for years or even decades, often with little monitoring.

And what about the fact that the World Health Organization has classified birth control pills as “carcinogenic to humans?” The WHO is hardly trying to promote a religious agenda, but in a 500-page report it found “sufficient evidence” that birth control pills increased the risk of breast cancer and cancers of the cervix and liver.

But medical judgment aside, should doctors have the right to opt out of treatments they believe to be deeply unethical? Cohn argues that doctors should leave their religious values and personal ethics out of their workplace.

This is a new and dangerously totalitarian way of thinking. In the past, we have always respected every person’s right to live according to their own moral and religious precepts. This is why our Charter says that “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and religion.”

Living out our values is the essence of true freedom. In dictatorships, everyone is still free to think, but they cannot act on their beliefs. In democracies like Canada, citizens have the right to conform their actions to their deepest values.

Cohn would take away this Charter protection from doctors, to save patients from the inconvenience and annoyance of having to go elsewhere. But is minor inconvenience really too high a price to pay for the fundamental freedom of our doctors, or any citizens? Ontario patients have plenty of alternative venues from which to get their prescriptions, such as public health clinics and emergency rooms. Abortions don’t even need a referral in Ontario.

If the medical profession is different from other professions, it is because ethics are so much more important in the field of medicine. Doctors hold our health and our lives in their hands. For centuries, we have insisted that doctors promise to do no harm, because we know that internal ethical limits make doctors far more responsible in the use of their medical powers. If doctors become mere machines that take orders without question, patients will ultimately be far less safe.

How can we trust doctors who leave their personal ethical limits at the door of their workplace? To really undermine confidence in our health care system, populate it with morally schizophrenic doctors who won’t mind performing procedures they admit are deeply unethical.

The law is too rough, corruptible and imperfect to prevent doctors from playing God. What will hold back doctors if the law permits any unethical procedures? Is it wise to place all our faith in regulations as our only safeguard when the scalpel looms over us?

We will reap what we sow. Perhaps we have truly become so dogmatic that we can no longer tolerate any dissent from the mantra of reproductive and sexual rights, and freedom is the next casualty. But freedom is a mighty tree that should not be cut down lightly. Our pluralist, democratic society lives in its branches, and the aftershocks of such a fall will be felt by all of us.

Lea Singh is a blogger, writer and lawyer who resides in Ottawa. Her blog is at http://leazsingh.blogspot.ca/.

Doctors Should Not Be Forced to Prescribe the Pill

Huffington Post

There’s a Toronto-based business called the Red Tent Sisters, which gives sex advice to women. They are advocates for women’s health, offering classes in everything from contraception to fertility and sexuality. They encourage women to leave hormonal contraception behind. “Ditch the Pill,” says their website, “and reclaim your health, happiness and future fertility.” Ditch the pill? To reclaim health? Happiness? What? The founders of the Red Tent Sisters teach that fertility awareness, also known as natural family planning, provides reliable contraception and is better for women’s health and the environment. There are many methods, but the commonality between them is that they eschew daily hormones and put women themselves in charge of their own sexual health without relying on Big Pharma. In short, fertility awareness is healthy and empowering. It could also soon be forbidden to advise or explain it for Ontario’s doctors. . . [Full Text]

Are we willing to make doctors into mere robots?

 LifeSite News

Reproduced with permission

Lea Singh

Some years ago I filled out a prescription for Yasmin, a birth control pill that is often prescribed, as in my case, to control acne for young women. Luckily the warning label scared me enough that I ended up throwing those pills in the garbage. I felt a bit foolish but followed my gut against the assurances of my doctor, who considered those pills the equivalent of Tylenol.

He was wrong. Yasmin made headlines last year when it was linked, together with another birth control pill, to the deaths of 23 women in Canada. This February the European Medicines Agency also admitted that the blood clot risks of Yasmin and similar newer birth control pills are much greater than previously thought.

The EMA’s statement came on the heels of a French report showing that about 20 French women per year died between 2000 and 2011 as a result of fatal blood clots from such ‘third-generation’ pills. All British physicians have now been ordered to warn their patients about the potentially fatal risk of blood clots associated with these pills.

But all this is apparently not enough. Nor is it enough that the World Health Organization has classified oral contraceptives as “carcinogenic to humans.”

It may never be enough for certain people, like Konrad Yakabuski of The Globe and Mail who recently criticized three Ottawa doctors for refusing to prescribe or refer for artificial contraception, saying: “The safety and effectiveness of popular government-approved contraceptives is not generally considered a matter of ‘medical judgment’ these days.”

Tell that to the families of the women who died on Yasmin, Mr. Yakabuski. The truth is, scientists are still studying the risks associated with our methods of artificial birth control, and the drugs that are legal and seemingly safe today might be history tomorrow.

Family doctors are often the first ones to see the red flags, and they should be free to stick to their medical judgements. After my Yasmin scare, I want doctors like that – doctors who haven’t been silenced by fear of feminist backlash, who dare to refuse to pump dangerous chemicals into my body. Such doctors might make me think twice about asking for that chemical cocktail, and they could save my life.

But medical judgement is not the only good reason why doctors might refuse to prescribe or refer. We should never require doctors to participate in treatments that would leave them feeling like they (sometimes quite literally) just killed a baby.

Why would we want to crush and destroy the spirit of our doctors by forcing them to cooperate with what they believe to be deeply wrong?

Here’s why: because the technical abilities of medicine have outgrown the moral limits of most world religions, and many people now feel entitled to treatments that their doctors might find abhorrent.

So the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is reviewing their policy on the freedom of doctors to refuse to provide or refer for treatments that violate their deepest moral and religious convictions.

Are we willing to make doctors into mere robots who won’t be allowed to question, much less refuse, our ethically precarious requests? Some people argue that since doctors work on the public dime, they should be like medical vending machines that dispense any legal service on demand.

But if we strip our doctors of their conscience in order to do our bidding, here’s the price we pay. First, expect an exodus of principled doctors from the profession. We’ll be chasing away the very doctors who might protect us most, those who are willing to take a stand against bad medicine. Not to mention that practising Christians, among others, will effectively be barred from applying to medical schools.

Second, we will be left with doctors who are either willing to do things they consider unethical, or who have few ethical limits to begin with. I get creepy visions of the darkest moments of history repeating, as we find one day that nothing remains to protect us from those same doctors when we are weak and vulnerable.

With euthanasia knocking on Ontario’s door from neighbouring Quebec, now would be a good time to think about how personal ethics and integrity should be valued, not discouraged in our physicians.