Category: Law

Assisted suicide and euthanasia bill proposed in Australian Senate

Medical Services (Dying with Dignity) Exposure Draft Bill 2014

A bill to legalize physician assisted suicide and euthanasia has been proposed to the Australian Senate by Green Party Senator Richard di Natale.  Since it is an “exposure draft” it is not in the queue for passage. It includes provisions that provide protection for medical practitioners who refuse to provide the services for “any reason.”  However:

  • The objects of the Act set out in Section 3 do not include the protection of conscientious objectors;
  • The definition of “dying with dignity medical service” in Section 5 includes
    • euthanasia
    •  assisted suicide
    • providing information
  • Since Section 5 is broadly written, it appears that the attending medical practitioner can delegate the act of euthanasia to someone else.
  • Section 11(2)a states that a medical practitioner may refuse to provide euthanasia or assisted suicide “for any reason,” which would include reasons of conscience or religion, but
    • the section pertains only to medical practitioners
      • so it does not protect objecting pharmacists or other health care workers
    • Section 11(2)a does not state that medical practitioners may refuse to facilitate euthanasia or assisted suicide throught referral
  • Section 21 precludes coercion of objecting medical practitioners, but
    • does not preclude coercion of other objecting health care workers, and
    • can be understood to prevent hospices or denominational hospitals from enacting policies against euthanasia and assisted suicide
  • Section 24 provides protection from civil and criminal liability and disciplinary proceedings for medical practitioners who refuse to provide euthanasia and assisted suicide, but
    •  does not clearly offer similar protection to objecting practitioners, since refusing to provide euthanasia or assisted suicide cannot be said to be an omission “for the purposes of the Act,” which are specified in Section 3, and
    • offers no protection at all for other objecting health care workers.
  • There is no provision to protect persons who object to euthanasia for reasons of conscience from discrimination in education or employment.

Euthanasia rulings in Europe stir right-to-die debate

CTV News

The Associated Press

PARIS  — One French court acquitted a doctor of poisoning seven terminally ill patients while another ordered physicians to suspend treatment for a comatose man, while Britain’s top court said the country’s ban on assisted suicide may be incompatible with human rights.

The decisions of the past few days are fueling the arguments of Europeans who say the duty of doctors is to end the suffering of those beyond treatment.

But emotions run high on all sides around the issue of euthanasia and assisted suicide, as is shown by the bitter case of the comatose Frenchman, Vincent Lambert. Hours after the French court sided with his wife in ordering an end to treatment, the European Court of Human Rights blocked the move at the request of his parents, in a rare late-night ruling. . . [Full text]

Director of IIRF Speaks at Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice on Freedom of Expression and Conscientious Objection

Christian Post

World Evangelical Alliance

“Religion is part of one’s personality. It is not like a car so that you arbitrarily can restrict its use from time to time,” claimed Dr. Thomas Schirrmacher in a lecture in Brazil’s Supreme Court. The lectures were attended by about 400 congressmen, members of the government, government staff, representatives of public authorities, heads of Christian churches, leaders of other religions, and the leadership of the Christian legal association ANAJURE.

Schirrmacher is the Rector of Martin Bucer Seminary, including its Brazilian branch, Executive Director of the International Institute for Religious Freedom, and Ambassador for Human Rights of the World Evangelical Alliance.

ANAJURE opened the First International Congress on Civil Liberties at the auditorium of the Brazilian Supreme Court with the theme “Freedom of Expression and Conscientious Objection.” The lectures were given by Dr. Thomas Schirrmacher and Dr. Jonatas Machado, Professor for Constitutional Law at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and moderated by Prof. Dr. Uziel Santana from the University of Aracaju and president of ANAJURE. . . . [Full text]

Fundamental freedoms

 Why the right to conscientious objection must be restored

Presentation to the Life Dinner
Melbourne, Australia

David van Gend*

I feel a little out of place coming from Queensland to speak about the wretched situation in Victoria: coming from a State where it is always sunny, where the people are always nice, and where we don’t have oppressive laws that try to compel the conscience of free citizens.

But we are all in this together: an assault on fundamental freedoms in one State will become a precedent for similar abuses in other States.

Uncivil society

It was a Melbourne man, Julian Savulescu, now an ethics professor at Oxford, who declared that doctors who will not provide abortion should be “punished through removal of license to practice”. He wrote in the British Medical Journal in 2006:

A doctors’ conscience has little place in the delivery of modern medical care. What should be provided to patients is defined by the law… If people are not prepared to offer legally permitted, efficient, and beneficial care to a patient because it conflicts with their values, they should not be doctors.1

Crucial to his argument is that, “when society has already decided that a service is legal”, it is not for doctors to “compromise the delivery of services”. When Savulescu’s article was discussed in 2006 in the medical newspaper Australian Doctor, I was given as an example of the sort of doctor who, in his view, “should either get out of the specialty or the profession altogether.”2  I gave a different angle to Australian Doctor: that abortion as commonly practiced is not a medical service; it is a “medical abuse” which doctors are bound by their Hippocratic principles and humane conscience not to commit.

And no law, no professional board, has the authority to compel any doctor to violate the principles of their vocation or mutilate their own conscience by collaborating in intentional killing.

Yet in Victoria, under section 8 of the Abortion Law Reform Act 2008,3 that compulsion by the authorities is exactly what doctors and nurses face.

Not long ago society was a little more civil and did not contemplate using the force of law to compel the conscience of fellow citizens. . . [Full text]

Professor argues for a profound rethinking of conscience rights

Mary Anne Waldron offers three solutions for legal quagmires

The B.C. Catholic

Alistair Burns

An argument in favour of changing how citizens approach freedom of conscience and religion was presented May 2. Mary Anne Waldron, a professor of law at the University of Victoria, spoke to an audience of 80 in Holy Name of Jesus Parish Hall in Vancouver.

Her lecture was the first event co-hosted by the Catholic Physicians’ Guild of the Archdiocese of Vancouver and the St. Thomas More Catholic Lawyers Guild.

She asked the crowd to ponder why “we protect conscientious and religious freedom, when it is so often inconvenient, may seem unfair, and often offends others.”

The law professor declared perhaps many would prefer a world “in which our (specific) view prevailed” on major legal problems: abortion, euthanasia, and sexual moral codes.

Freedom of conscience and religion rights, she asserted, should allow the participation of all citizens in debates on social policies and norms, “protecting the minority against tyranny by the majority.” [Full Text]