Category: Assisted suicide

Assisted death: Recognize this new right, but carefully limit it

The Globe and Mail

Editorial

Suicide is not the answer, generally speaking. But we are not speaking generally when we talk about drafting a law legalizing and regulating physician-assisted suicide – a law the Supreme Court of Canada has told Parliament to enact by June 6.

The new law will ease and enable suicide, normalizing what in most circumstances is a harmful, undesirable act by fitting it into a compassionate health-care system through the exculpatory power of legislation. As such – as a necessary exception to all the rules and norms that constitute our traditional sense of collective good, which focuses on extending life rather than ending it – the coming law on physician-assisted dying needs to be extremely specific and tightly defined. . . [Full text]

 

Canadian ethicists prepare for the worst

Bioedge

 Michael Cook

Conscientious objection seems like the paradigmatic ethical choice between right and wrong. An ethicist, of all people, ought to have this option, just as mathematicians count or sopranos sing.

Not so fast, write two healthcare ethicists at the Centre for Applied Ethics at McGill University Health Centre, in Montreal, in the blog Impact Ethics. Now that the Canadian Supreme Court has declared that euthanasia is a human right, it is time to focus on who is entitled to conscientious objection to participating in euthanasia. And perhaps ethicists are not.

We found ourselves asking the following questions: Should a clinical ethicist have the right to conscientious objection in cases of medical aid in dying? Can the role of the clinical ethicist to provide ethics analysis in matters of moral ambiguity be reconciled with a right to opt-out on the basis of personal convictions?

The nub of the question is this: when an ethicist is asked for advice, is she involved as a human being or is she merely a database of ethical choices? The ethicists write:

On the other hand, there is a growing consensus that clinical ethics expertise is grounded in the competence of the clinical ethicist to facilitate a robust process aimed at ensuring fair and transparent healthcare decisions. The clinical ethicist is expected to adopt a stance of neutrality which allows her to facilitate discussion of competing values without allowing her own beliefs to influence the discussion.

On this view, it is not the “rightness” or “wrongness” of the final outcome by which the clinical ethicist is professionally judged, but rather her skill in guiding various stakeholders through a reasonable process; a clinical ethicist’s personal convictions should not impact on her ability to facilitate this process. In this sense, perhaps the right to conscientious objection is antithetical to the provision of clinical ethics consultation, as it seems to call into question the profession’s ability to remain neutral on morally contentious issues.

There is an urgent need, the authors write, to articulate the rights and duties of healthcare ethicists, as in the wake of Carter v Canada, the euthanasia case, the boundaries will be tested.

It would be interesting indeed if Canadian ethicists who oppose euthanasia are told to pack their bags and look elsewhere for jobs. What do unemployed ethicists do? Work in Starbucks? Become an Uber driver? There are some great ideas at the website of the Unemployed Philsophers Guild — making coffee mugs, finger puppets, and scented soap.

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Hotel-Dieu, Hospice hope to avoid providing doctor-assisted death

Windsor Star

Brian Cross

Those seeking to escape the agony of incurable illnesses will have the legal right to choose doctor-assisted suicide as of June 6, but two publicly funded institutions that care for the region’s dying hope they won’t be forced to allow it within their walls.

Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare runs the area’s only in-hospital palliative care unit, where five, six or seven deaths a week is not unusual. As a faith-based Catholic hospital, it does not believe it should participate in physician-assisted suicide, said CEO Janice Kaffer.

The Hospice of Windsor and Essex County has a policy opposing physician-assisted suicide, citing a “respect for the dignity and sanctity of human life,” and asserting that it’s not part of palliative care. It provides palliative care to hundreds of area patients in their homes, as well as in its hospice residences in Windsor and Leamington. Its philosophy is if someone’s pain and symptoms can be well managed, they don’t need to resort to a physician-assisted death. CEO Carol Derbyshire said Canada’s hospices are trying to convince the government to let them to opt out. . . [Full text]

 

Protest, petition against forcing hospitals, hospices, etc. to kill patients or assist with suicide

 Note:  The Carter decision actually orders legalization of physician assisted suicide AND euthanasia, and demands are being made to force objecting institutions to provide or allow both on their premises. [Administrator]

“Let’s not mince words: I killed people who wanted to die.”

Canadian euthanasia activist posthumously discloses serial murders

Sean Murphy*

John Hofsess, a long-time assisted suicide/euthanasia activist, committed suicide on 29 February, 2016 at a facility in Basel, Switzerland run by the Eternal Spirit Foundation.  He was accompanied by Madeline Weld (an editor of Humanist Perspectives) and four others, two of whom were filmmakers doing a documentary about his death.

"Let's not mince words: I killed people who wanted to die."Four days later, Toronto Life published Weld’s account of his death and his posthumous confession to having murdered at least four people between 1999 and 2001, including noted Canadian poet Al Purdy, and either murdered or assisted with the suicide of four others.  He abandoned the practice because it became too risky after police charged his accomplice, Evelyn Martens, with two counts of assisted suicide in 2002 with respect to the deaths of two women;  Hofsess states that he knew nothing them.  Martens was acquitted in a jury trial two years later and died in 2011.

Hofsess’ description of the method he employed in four of the cases (including Purdy’s) makes clear his clients did not kill themselves with his assistance; rather, he killed them with their consent.  Consent to being killed was not a defence to a charge of murder at the time; planned and deliberate homicide, even with consent, was first degree murder.  Consistent with this, he was advised by two lawyers that he could expect to be charged with “crimes ranging from assisted suicide to first-degree murder” if he published his account.

In Carter v. Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada decided to strike down the absolute prohibition of using consent as a defence to a charge of murder.  Under the terms of the ruling, a physician who kills a patient in the circumstances defined by the Court can use the patient’s consent as a defence to a charge of murder; in that case the killing is non-culpable homicide.  It remains first degree murder even under the terms of the Carter ruling if the client or patient is killed by a layman like Hofsess, even if the homicide otherwise conforms to the requirements of the law.

Hofsess was forthright in describing what he did.

“Let’s not mince words,” he wrote.  “I killed people who wanted to die.”

This is precisely what troubles health care workers who do not want to provide or to become accomplices to physician administered euthanasia or physician assisted suicide.  They do not want to kill people or help them commit suicide, even people who want to die.