Category: Assisted suicide

Why would my terminally ill father be denied a medically assisted death?

The Globe and Mail

Paul Taylor

The question: My father was in the advanced stages of prostate cancer and wanted a medically assisted death. He was told he needed the approval of two health-care providers. One said yes, but the other said no because he “was not in any distress.” But that decision was so wrong. My father was a very stoic man, and was not one to complain. Did the doctor want him to break down in tears and beg to be put to death? My father died two weeks later in a hospice – instead of his home, the place where he wanted to die.

The answer: It has been over a year and a half since Parliament passed a law that makes medical assistance in dying – called MAID for short – legal across Canada. The story you tell reflects one of the many challenges in creating a standardized system to handle these requests and to ensure that patients and their families are properly informed.

One key failing in your father’s case is that he was not apparently told he could have asked for another assessment after the second MAID assessor turned him down. If another assessor had agreed that he was eligible, he could have proceeded with an assisted death.

It’s impossible to say whether his assessors were unaware he had this option or simply failed to mention it.

Whatever the case, “we need to do a better job educating health-care providers about what they must be disclosing to patients,” says Jocelyn Downie, a professor in the faculties of law and medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

In the meantime, it’s certainly worthwhile reviewing how the process is supposed to work. . . [Full Text]

The Alarming Trend Of Bullying Hospitals And Hospices Into Assisted Suicide

Huffington Post

Reproduced with permission

Dr. Will Johnston

Canadians who are sick and suicidal can now be put to death under various medicalized and government-approved protocols, following court and legislative victories by euthanasia activists. These activists are now turning their considerable talents to a coercive makeover of the palliative hospice movement by demanding that hospices founded on a promise to never deliberately hasten death should provide a death

Before they got their way in the Canadian Supreme Court, the public posture of euthanasia advocates was one of caution, reassurance and limitation of objectives. After their victory, partisans of the medical killing movement have become impatient with individuals or institutions who want no part in suicide and euthanasia. Activists recommend expanding access to include all the people who were strategically excluded from the plan that had been sold to the public: children, people with chronic nonfatal conditions, the physically disabled, the cognitively disabled, psychiatric patients.

Now, even changing the location of a patient requesting suicide — from a euthanasia-free hospital or hospice, to one that does offer it — is being protested as a cruel imposition. In doing so, the death-seeking person is set up as a victim, and the hospital or hospice is portrayed as a victimizer. Never mind that hospital wards routinely transport people in complete comfort to procedures like X-rays or scopes, or to another location to continue care.

The implications of this are dire. Many hospices serve patients who want nothing to do with assisted suicide, and there will be much harm done by forcing it into their midst. Every community in this country has the resources to provide a distinct euthanasia-free space. That distinct space and its staff could be specialized and uncoerced into death-hastening.

The unpleasant alternative was demonstrated by the recent “sneak attack” on Louis Brier Hospital, a Jewish retirement home in Vancouver. This was the work of euthanasia activist Ellen Wiebe, idolized by like-minded columnists for her aggressive death-providing practice. Rather than arrange a simple transfer — perhaps to the home of one of the suicidal father’s daughters — the patient was killed by Dr. Wiebe against the firm policy of a facility with an understandable aversion to euthanasia.

As Louis Brier’s director protested, “We have a lot of Holocaust survivors. To have a doctor sneak in and kill someone without telling anyone. They’re going to feel like they’re at risk when you learn someone was sneaking in and killing someone.”

What Dr. Wiebe was doing by giving the finger to Louis Brier is a form of ethical bullying, masquerading as an altruistic claim that her client should come first and trump other people’s rights about the kind of place they want to live in.

Wanting Dr. Wiebe to kill you is a tragedy, not an emergency. It is a personal preference, sadly now provided by the Canadian health-care system, but without any judicial or parliamentary authorization to force others to accept involuntary proximity to your actions. It is also, increasingly, about people who are not dying, except in Dr. Wiebe’s elastic interpretation, but about those who have lost meaning and hope. What they get from the euthanasia provider amounts to a heartless endorsement of the hopelessness of their situation, cloaked in the language of autonomy.

Rather than look for a win-win compromise over this issue, the board of Fraser Health Authority, a large B.C. hospital system, has imposed euthanasia provision in all its palliative hospices. This edict, totally uncalled for by provincial or federal guidelines, caused the high-profile resignation of Palliative Care Medical Director Dr. Neil Hilliard.

Meanwhile, our governments are, in Dr. Hilliard’s words, “guilty by neglect” of a “palliative care access gap,” and your sick family member who seeks care, not death, may not find it “equitable or timely.”

Forcing hospices to betray their no-kill founding principles will not close that gap, it will just torpedo the 40-year struggle to convince often-fearful patients that palliative hospices are not about hastening death.

Fraser Health and any other misled health bureaucracies across Canada should back down. Don’t bully hospices as though there are no fair alternatives. Don’t bully Catholic hospitals, founded on a reverence for life long before the public purse got involved.

Dutch euthanasia regulator quits over dementia killings

Catholic Herald

Simon Caldwell

The number of dementia patients killed by euthanasia has risen fourfold over the past five years

A Dutch euthanasia regulator has quit her post in protest at the killings of patients suffering from dementia.

Berna van Baarsen, a medical ethicist, said she could not support “a major shift” in the interpretation of her country’s euthanasia law to endorse lethal injections for increasing numbers of dementia patients.

She has now resigned from one of Holland’s five regional assessment committees set up to oversee the provision of euthanasia. . . [Full Text]

BC recorded 188 medically assisted deaths; 77 on Vancouver Island

Vancouver Sun

Amy Smart, Victoria Times-Colonist

Seventy-seven people on Vancouver Island died with medical assistance in 2016, more than any other region in B.C. — and most other provinces.

Some speculate the high number might be the result of demographics and a long history of advocacy for the right to assisted death.

For each assisted death performed, between five and 10 patients are deemed ineligible, Island Health said.

A Times Colonist survey of provincial coroners, health ministries and health authories found that British Columbia ranked among the highest of medical assistance in dying, with 188 assisted deaths recorded. That was one more than Ontario, where the chief coroner recorded 187 deaths. . . [Full Text]

‘I thought it was ridiculous’: Religious facilities opposing assisted death leave patients in a bind

The Globe and Mail

Kelly Grant

The first time that Ian Pope was transferred out of a Vancouver Catholic hospital for an assisted-death eligibility assessment, the appointment started badly and ended worse.

On the taxi ride from St. Paul’s Hospital to a downtown clinic, a catheter bag affixed to the 64-year-old’s electric wheelchair ruptured. A vase had to be placed under it to catch the leaking urine.

As the appointment wore on, Mr. Pope, who had an advanced case of multiple sclerosis, could barely stay awake.

“He closed his eyes for a while,” said Ellen Wiebe, the doctor who assessed him. “I could get him to answer questions and he was being totally co-operative, but he was just so exhausted by the end.”

Dr. Wiebe, along with Mr. Pope’s daughter and a second doctor who also examined him, say the retired police officer suffered unnecessarily when he was twice transferred out of a publicly funded hospital to find out if he met the criteria for a legal assisted death.

Both doctors would have been happy to meet Mr. Pope in his hospital room, but St. Paul’s, which is part of a Catholic health network that opposes assisted death, would not allow it.

Mr. Pope was transferred out of the hospital a final time on Dec. 9 to receive an assisted death at the near-empty apartment he had not lived in for months.

“I thought it was ridiculous,” Mr. Pope’s daughter, Rachael, said, “because it’s a publicly funded hospital.”