Category: Assisted suicide

Has stopping eating and drinking become a path to assisted dying?

Policy Options

Jocelyn Downie

Can patients, by stopping eating and drinking, make themselves meet the criteria for a “grievous and irremediable medical condition,” the requirement to access MAiD?

Ms. S. was a 56-year-old woman with advanced multiple sclerosis. In June 2016, when her suffering became intolerable and her state of decline was advanced as a result of her incurable medical condition, she asked Dr. Ellen Wiebe for medical assistance in dying (MAiD). Ms. S. had earlier declined potentially effective treatment. Dr. Wiebe concluded that Ms. S. met most of the eligibility criteria for MAiD in Canada: incurable condition, advanced state of decline in capability, and enduring and intolerable suffering not remediable by any means acceptable to her. However, as she did not believe that Ms. S. would die “in the foreseeable future,” she deemed her not to meet the final eligibility criterion for MAiD: “natural death has become reasonably foreseeable.” Ms. S. asked again for MAiD in December 2016 and January 2017 and each time she was deemed ineligible on the same grounds. . . [Full Text]

Nurse practitioners not always compensated for providing medical assistance in dying

Ministry of Health and Long Term Care does not provide fee-for-service the way it does for physicians

CBC News

Angela Gemmill

The Nurse Practitioners Association of Ontario says some of its members are helping to provide their patients with medically assisted deaths without compensation.

It wasn’t until April of 2017 that nurse practitioners (NPs) in Ontario could prescribe the controlled substances used for medical assistance in dying (MAID).

Since then about 40 NPs across the province have provided either patient assessments or the procedure itself.

A patient must be assessed by two independent health care providers. This can be either a physician or a nurse practitioner. The procedure is the same regardless of who provides it.

One nurse practitioner in Sudbury, Ont. says it’s important for her to provide support to patients who want to take this step. She admits that medical assistance in dying is rather limited in Sudbury, in that not a lot of physicians or nurse practitioners are willing to provide it for patients. . . [Full text]

 

‘The solution is assisted life’: Offered death, terminally ill Ont. man files lawsuit

CTV News

A landmark lawsuit has been filed by an Ontario man suffering from an incurable neurological disease. He alleges that health officials will not provide him with an assisted home care team of his choosing, instead offering, among other things, medically assisted death.

“My condition is grievous and irremediable,” 42-year-old Roger Foley said from his bed at the London Health Science Centre’s Victoria Hospital in a video that was recently posted online. “But the solution is assisted life with self-directed funding.”

According to Foley, a government-selected home care provider had previously left him in ill health with injuries and food poisoning. Unwilling to continue living at home with the help of that home care provider, and eager to leave the London hospital where he’s been cloistered for two years, Foley is suing the hospital, several health agencies and the attorneys general of Ontario and Canada in the hopes of being given the opportunity to set up a health care team to help him live at home again — a request he claims he has previously been denied. . . [Full Text]

Formal network of docs offering medical assistance in dying is in the works for northeastern Ontario

Informal referral network currently in place with local physicians

CBC News

Angela Gemmill

For those in Sudbury and District seeking a doctor’s help to die, it may soon get a little easier to find one who is trained.

About 40 doctors and nurse practitioners in the region are now trained to offer Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), after they had specialized training last fall in Sudbury from the Canadian Medical Association.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in June, 2016  that medical assistance in dying is a constitutional right, under Bill C-14.

Between then and now, there has only been an informal network for people seeking medically assisted death, said Dr. Paul Preston, Vice President of Clinical for the North East Local Health Integration Network, and an advocate for access for those seeking a doctor’s help with dying. . . [Full text]

 

Assisted-Suicide Pushers Want Forced MD Participation

National Review
Reproduced with permission

Wesley J. Smith*

Assisted-suicide advocates pretend they want assisted suicide limited to the terminally ill.

They pretend that they favor strict guidelines.

And they pretend they would never want doctors forced to participate in intentionally ending the life of a patient. Indeed, the laws they have passed all contain conscience protections.

Except, sometimes they show their true hands. For example, when the Canadian Supreme Court imposed a broad right to lethal-injection euthanasia — certainly not limited to the dying — Compassion and Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society) issued a laudatory press release — later scrubbed because it told the truth about the movement’s true goals.

And now, Compassion and Choices — again, which has included conscience protections in laws it sponsored as a necessary predicate to passage — has come out strongly against a proposed Trump-administration office in HHS to protect medical professionals from forced participation in procedures against their consciences and/or religious beliefs. From an email sent to its supporters (my emphasis):

The new division marks one of the greatest threats we’re facing to the future of the end-of-life choice movement and patient-centered care.

Under the HHS proposed rules, providers who object to various procedures could impose their own religious beliefs on their patients by withholding vital information about treatment options from them — including options such as voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, palliative sedation or medical aid in dying. And your federal tax dollars will be used to protect physicians who make the unconscionable decision to willfully hold back information from a patient and abandon them when they are at their most vulnerable.

This is unacceptable and needs to be stopped.

Note the warning that conscience protections threaten “the future” of the assisted-suicide movement. It is abundantly clear that these suicide advocates believe forcing doctors to participate in suicide is essential to implementing their lethal agenda.

C & C already tried to impose such a duty on doctors in Vermont in support of a regulation that sought to force doctors to share information on assisted suicide with patients. That violated the assisted-suicide law’s conscience protections. Dissenting doctors sued and forced the bureaucrats to retreat. C & C tried to intervene legally to (unsuccessfully) thwart that settlement.

So, this is the truth: If C & C prevails in legalizing assisted suicide (and eventually, euthanasia) across the country, pressure will soon begin to force dissenting MDs, nurses, and pharmacists to either get on the death train or get out of medicine.

For those with eyes to see, let them see.

 

Accessed 2018-03-28