Category: Assisted suicide

Lawmakers clash over euthanasia bill

Legislation would allow doctors to facilitate assisted suicide for terminal patients without criminal repercussions

The Times of Israel

Aron Dónzis

A day after Israeli ministers gave the go-ahead to a bill regulating assisted suicide for terminally ill patients, the country’s minister for senior citizens appealed the decision, saying he would work to “save the legal system from this pill of death.”

Senior Citizens Minister Uri Orbach (Jewish Home) submitted an appeal Monday to the Ministerial Committee for Legislation against the euthanasia bill approved Sunday by MKs Ofer Shelah (Yesh Atid) and Zahava Gal-on (Meretz).

The bill, passed Sunday by a majority vote in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, states that a patient defined as “terminal” could be granted a prescription for a lethal dose of anesthetics, and the prescribing doctor could not be held criminally responsible. . . . [Full text]

Embargo on lethal drug stops executions and assisted suicides in US

 Bioedge

Michael Cook

A shortage of a lethal drug is stopping both executions and assisted suicide in the United States. The supply of Nembutal, the drug of choice for executing prisoners in many American states and for assisted suicide in Oregon and Washington state, has dried up because its European manufacturer, the Danish company Lundbeck, refuses to supply it for use in executions. This has had an unintended consequence: patients in Oregon who want physician-assisted suicide cannot get it.

In a recent, widely-reported execution, the state of Oklahoma tried a three-drug cocktail as a substitute for Nembutal (also called pentobarbital or sodium thiopental) last month, but the prisoner, Clayton Lockett, appeared to die in great pain. So patients in Oregon are not going to be using that. A second-best drug, secobarbital, costs between US$1,500 and $2,300-more than five times pentobarbital and it is still hard to obtain.

The botched execution has dismayed lobbyists for assisted suicide because it suggests that a satisfactory substitute for Nembutal will be hard to find. According to the Wilamette Week, an Oregon newspaper, “Advocates would like to expand the policy across the country, and their concerns about bad publicity hampering that rollout appear to account for their reluctance to discuss Oregon’s shortage.”

The assisted suicide lobby, therefore, has turned to other solutions. Compassion & Choices (the rebranded Hemlock Society) has asked the Oregon Board of Pharmacy to allow a pharmacy to manufacture the drug from raw materials.

“Providing this service is important to Oregonians, and I’m very concerned about what appears to be a complete lack of availability of the drug we’ve historically used,” State Senator Elizabeth Steiner Hayward (who is also a doctor who dispenses assisted suicide prescriptions) told Wilamette Week. “What I’ve been told by the pharmacists is the drug is completely unavailable, and we should not prescribe it.”

The irony that one group lobbying against death is frustrating the work of another group lobbying for death was not lost on bioethics gadfly Wesley J. Smith. “It seems to me that if the drugs are wrong to use in lawful executions, they are also wrong to prescribe to people who want to kill themselves. Death-causing is death-causing, and that ain’t medicine,” he wrote in the National Review.

There are other ironies. It is widely acknowledged that it is against medical ethics for doctors to participate in executions. However, Oregon is one of the few states that mandates physician participation in an execution. And anticipating objections by a doctor’s colleagues, it has banned sanctions against him (or her) for participating in an execution.

Embargo on lethal drug stops executions and assisted suicides in USThis article is published by Michael Cook and BioEdge.org under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation to Bioedge. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.

Canadian assisted suicide/euthanasia bill lacks protection of conscience provision

Member of Parliament Steven Fletcher has introduced Bill C581 in the Canadian House of Commons, a private member’s bill to legalize physician assisted suicide and euthanasia.  He has also introduced Bill C582 to establish a Canadian Commission on Physician Assisted Death, a body that would “produce public information on physician-assisted death and to support law and policy reform with respect to physician-assisted death.”  Bill C581 does not include a protection of conscience clause for physicians or health care workers who refuse to participate in euthanasia or assisted suicide for reasons of conscience.  Due to Canadian rules of parliamentary procedure and unwillingness of the governing party to revisit the issues, it is highly unlikely that the bills will come to a vote.

Project article on Quebec euthanasia bill published in Turkish law journal

Project article on Quebec euthanasia bill published in Turkish law journalThe three part series Redefining the practice of medicine: Winks and nods and euthanasia in Quebec (Bill 52: An Act respecting end-of-life care) has been translated into Turkish and published in volume 14 of the Comparative Current Criminal Law Series by Özyeğin University in Istanbul.

Entrenching a ‘duty to do wrong’ in medicine

Canadian government funds project to suppress freedom of conscience and religion

 Sean Murphy*

A 25 year old woman who went to an Ottawa walk-in clinic for a birth control prescription was told that the physician offered only Natural Family Planning and did not prescribe or refer for contraceptives or related services. She was given a letter explaining that his practice reflected his “medical judgment” and “professional ethical concerns and religious values.” She obtained her prescription at another clinic about two minutes away and posted the physician’s letter on Facebook. The resulting crusade against the physician and two like-minded colleagues spilled into mainstream media and earned a blog posting by Professor Carolyn McLeod on Impact Ethics.

Professor McLeod objects to the physicians’ practice for three reasons. First: it implies – falsely, in her view – that there are medical reasons to prefer natural family planning to manufactured contraceptives. Second, she claims that refusing to refer for contraceptives and abortions violates a purported “right” of access to legal services. Third, she insists that the physician should have met the patient to explain himself, and then helped her to obtain contraception elsewhere by referral. Along the way, she criticizes Dr. Jeff Blackmer of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) for failing to denounce the idea that valid medical judgement could provide reasons to refuse to prescribe contraceptives. . .
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