Category: Assisted suicide

Jewish physicians’ freedom of conscience and religion and the Carter Case

Wagner-Sidlofsky LLP
Reproduced with permission

Charles Wagner* and Adam Hummel*

How does the decision in the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General)1 (“Carter”) impact on the religious Jewish doctor? Will this landmark decision bring into conflict these doctors’ freedom of conscience and religion with their professional obligations? The Carter case sets aside federal criminal laws as they relate to physician assisted suicide. It stands for the proposition that individuals who are suffering unbearably have a constitutional right to a physician-assisted suicide. Canada now joins only eight other countries in the world that have decriminalized physician-assisted suicide in recent years. This is a fundamental change in the law.

Previously, in the 1993 decision of Rodriguez v. British Columbia (Attorney-General)2, the SCC confirmed the criminal sanctions as they related to physician-assisted suicide, while justifying their ruling by citing the protection of the sanctity of life. Given the importance of Carter, the authors will consider some of the main concepts discussed in the decision, and consider how the SCC’s position has changed over the last 22 years. . . [Full text]

 

Podcast: Amir Attaran and the elves: A law professor makes much ado

Podcast: Amir Attaran and the elves: A law professor makes much adoA response to   “Doctors can’t refuse to help a patient die – no matter what they say”, a column by University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran.  He refers to  the alleged “corrosive hostility” of the Canadian Medical Association to “physician-assisted dying” and its “cowardly and stupid” position on the procedure, including support for physician freedom of conscience. [Full text – Amir Attaran and the elves]

Podcast Contents

Introduction (00 – 01:40)

Attaran: CMA siding with “bigots”  (02:11 –  4:50  )

Attaran: “they cannot refuse”  (05:23 – 06:33)

What Professor Attaran left out  (06:34 – 08:15 )

Professor  Attaran then and now  (08:50 – 09:56)

Law on abortion vs. law on homicide  (09:57 – 11:32)

A difference in perspective  (11:33  – 13:12)

What else Professor Attaran left out  (13:13 – 18:38)

Getting the facts backwards  (19:11 – 20:50 )

Amir Attaran and the elves

 

A law professor makes much ado

Sean Murphy*

In a column in the on-line magazine iPolitics,1 University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran asserts that the “corrosive hostility” of the Canadian Medical Association to “physician-assisted dying” is evident in its “cowardly and stupid” position on the procedure. He claims that the Association “all but threatened” the Supreme Court of Canada that “doctors would rise up” to block it.

In his telling, ever since the Court ignored the threat and struck down the law, the CMA has been acting like a “sore loser,” trying to persuade physicians not to participate. As evidence, he quotes a CMA policy recommendation: “Physicians are not obligated to fulfil requests for assisted dying.” And he complains that the CMA won’t force physicians unwilling to kill patients or help them commit suicide to find someone who will.

Now, the CMA also states that all eligible people should have access to the services without undue delay, and physicians will work with others to ensure access to them,2 but Professor Attaran ignores this. His analysis of CMA policy is simple and scathing. Some physicians, he says, are “bigots,” and the CMA is siding with “those bigots” rather than with patients.

Professor Attaran identifies the bigots: physicians who believe that killing patients or helping them commit suicide is gravely wrong, or at least a bad idea, even in the circumstances defined by the Supreme Court. Those whom Professor Attaran denounces as bigots include physicians who believe they are ethically obliged to compassionately accompany and support dying patients, but not to kill them.

On the contrary, says Professor Attaran, they are “duty-bound” to kill patients or help them commit suicide precisely because the Supreme Court “pointedly” approved “physician-assisted suicide.”*  If physicians won’t help patients commit suicide, he rages, “then who does the CMA think should be obliged to help – elves, maybe?”

To which any number of physicians have already replied, “Not elves, but lawyers.”

[Full text]

[iPolitics version- Doctors aren’t obliged — legally or otherwise — to help people die]

 

What happens when a patient’s right to die and a doctor’s right to refuse collide?

Saskatoon StarPhoenix

Jonathan Charlton

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan is set to finalize a policy to guide the province’s doctors on the controversial issue of doctor assisted death.

While the Supreme Court of Canada has struck down the old law forbidding the service, the former Conservative government didn’t introduce new legislation. The new Liberal government, meanwhile, could ask for an extension to the court’s Feb. 6, 2016 deadline.

However, the College doesn’t want doctors in the province to be stranded without any guidance, hence its own policy, which could be finalized at the College’s meeting Friday.

Associate registrar Bryan Salte walked the Saskatoon StarPhoenix through the complex issue. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. [Full text]

Related:

Project submission re: conscientious objection policy

Beware of assisted-suicide zealots

National Post

Will Johnston

For at least a few more months, the Canadian medical system will continue to be a safe space, free of assisted suicide and euthanasia. But all that is about to change. In order to ensure our hospitals and palliative care centres remain places where patients feel safe and secure, we must respect doctors’ conscience rights, rather than listen to activists who seek to impose their one-size-fits-all policy on the rest of us.

For instance, the palliative care centres in Quebec that refuse to have anything to do with euthanasia, for reasons of medical judgment and ethics, have apparently angered Jean-Pierre Menard, the lawyer who helped write Quebec’s euthanasia law, Bill 52. The act specifically states that palliative care centres are not required to provide euthanasia service — but maybe to Menard, those were just soothing words to get the bill passed. Now Menard says money should be taken away from palliative services that won’t provide euthanasia on their premises. And the minister of health, Gaetan Barrette, has threatened to revoke the hospital privileges of doctors who won’t comply. . . . [Full text]