Category: Assisted suicide

York Region health care professionals offer mixed views on doctor-assisted suicide

yorkregion.co

Lisa Queen

Let the soul searching begin.

True, the Supreme Court of Canada delivered a unanimous and historic decision last Friday, striking down the country’s ban on doctor-assisted suicide for consenting and severely ill adult patients. It gave Ottawa a year to enact new legislation.

And true, an opinion poll last fall indicated 84 per cent of Canadians believe “a doctor should be able to help someone end his or her life if the person is a competent adult who is terminally ill, suffering unbearably and repeatedly asks for assistance to die.”

But the issue is striking closer to home for health care providers, who, some day in the very near future, could be asked to help patients end their lives, according to Dr. Cindy So and Jonathan Breslin. . . [Full Text]

 

Dying Dutch: Euthanasia Spreads Across Europe

Newsweek

Winston Ross

In one of the last photographs my family took of my grandmother, she looks as if she’s been in a fistfight. Jean Bass Tinsley is lying in a hospital bed in Athens, Georgia, wearing a turquoise button-up shirt and staring blankly at the camera. A bandage obscures her fractured skull, along with the bridge of her bloodied nose. She is 91 years old.

My grandmother essentially did this to herself. In June 2013, she fell out of her wheelchair headfirst, after ignoring her caregivers’ warnings not to get out of bed without help. Earlier that year, she’d broken both of her hips, in separate falls. Before that, her pelvis-all while trying to do what for most of her life she’d managed just fine on her own: walk.

In her last year, dementia crept into my grandmother’s mind. The staff at her long-term-care facility plotted ways to protect her from herself. It’s against the law in Georgia to restrain patients in such facilities, so they lowered her bed to the floor and put a pad down next to it. They even installed an alarm that went off if she left her mattress. My grandmother disabled the alarm, moved the pad and freed herself, repeatedly. In the end, she was both too weak and too strong. [Full text]

 

Archbishop of Toronto: trust in physician regulators is misplaced

Sean Murphy*

Cardinal Thomas Collins, Catholic Archbishop of Toronto, warns that the Supreme Court was unwise to trust Colleges of Physicians to protect physicians who are unwilling to provide assisted suicide or euthanasia for reasons of conscience.  He noted that the College of Physicians of Ontario is planning to force objecting physicians to refer patients to colleagues willing to kill them or help them commit suicide, thus making the objectors “accomplices” in the killing. His comments were part of an extensive critique of the Supreme Court of Canada ruling in Carter v. Canada. [LifeSite News]

Keep the state out of the killing rooms of the nation

 National Post

Barbara Kay

Commentary following last Friday’s Supreme Court decision on assisted suicide has filled the pages of this and other Canadian publications. Opinion for and against the ruling has been intelligently debated. But I have yet to see a column that focuses directly on my own concerns, so here is my two cents.

I am firmly in the anti-euthanasia camp, as my last two columns have indicated. There is no question in my mind that once euthanasia is permitted to those capable of self-determination, “equality” activists will demand – and get – euthanasia for those who also suffer terribly, but are incapable of assenting to their own physician-enabled deaths. That has been proven to be the case in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Some readers assume that this also puts me in the anti-assisted-suicide camp as well. That is not the case. I find I have a more ambivalent position on this question. I support the right of any individual who finds life unbearable for whatever reason to take his own life. I therefore cannot in conscience refuse someone yearning to die, but incapable of carrying out his wish, the right to ask for assistance in achieving that goal. . . [Full Text]