Category: News

Medical aid in dying: Court challenge

News Release

Living with Dignity, Physicians’ Alliance

MONTREAL, July 17, 2014 /CNW Telbec/ – As announced when Bill 52, An Act Respecting End-of-Life Care, was adopted, the citizen movement Living with Dignity (LWD) and the Physicians’ Alliance against Euthanasia (the Alliance), representing together over 650 physicians and 17,000 citizens, have today filed a lawsuit before the Superior Court of Quebec in the District of Montreal.

The lawsuit requests that the Court declare invalid all the provisions of An Act Respecting End-of-Life Care that deal with “medical aid in dying”, a euphemism used to describe euthanasia. This Act not only allows certain patients to demand that a physician provoke their death, but also grants physicians the right to cause the death of these patients by the administration of a lethal substance.

The Alliance and LWD are challenging the constitutionality of those provisions in the Act which are aimed at decriminalizing euthanasia under the euphemism “medical aid in dying”. Euthanasia constitutes a culpable homicide under the Criminal Code. It is a subject-matter which is at the core of the exclusive federal legislative power in relation to criminal law and Quebec therefore does not have the power to adopt these provisions.

In addition, the impugned provisions unjustifiably infringe the rights to life and to security of patients guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. They further infringe the right to the safeguard of the dignity of the person, which is also protected by the Quebec Charter.

In view of the gravity of the situation and the urgent need to protect all vulnerable persons in Quebec, the Alliance and LWD request an accelerated management of the case in order to obtain a judgement before the expected coming into force of the Act on December 10, 2015.

Sources: The citizen network Living with Dignity and the Physicians’ Alliance against euthanasia .

Navy nurse refuses to force-feed Guantánamo captive

Detainee’s lawyer says her client described the Navy medical officer’s refusal as an act of conscientious objection.

Miami Herald

Carol Rosenberg

In the first known rebellion against Guantánamo’s force-feeding policy, a Navy medical officer recently refused to continue managing tube-feedings of prison hunger strikers and was reassigned to “alternative duties.”

A prison camp spokesman, Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, would not provide precise details but said Monday night that the episode had “no impact to medical support operations at the base.”

“There was a recent instance of a medical provider not willing to carry out the enteral feeding of a detainee,” he said in an email. “The matter is in the hands of the individual’s leadership.”

Word of the refusal reached the outside world last week in a call from prisoner Abu Wael Dhiab to attorney Cori Crider of the London-based legal defense group Reprieve. Dhiab, a hunger striker, described how a nurse in the Navy medical corps abruptly refused to “force-feed us” sometime before the Fourth of July — and disappeared from detention center duty. . . [Full Text]

One Conscientious Objector at Gitmo Is Great – But It’s Not Enough

Vice News

Natasha Lennard

The international medical community has long maintained an ethical line against force-feeding. As infectious disease specialist Kent Sepkowitz has written, “Without question, it is the most painful procedure doctors routinely inflict on conscious patients… The procedure is, in a word, barbaric.”

Yet in Guantanamo Bay, it is daily procedure for a reported 18 hunger striking detainees. Every day medical professionals watch strapped-down inmates gasp, gag, and choke with streaming eyes as rubber tubes are snaked through sensitive nasal passages into empty stomachs. Despite urging from institutions including the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine, Gitmo prison medical staff continue to participate, all of them just following orders. All but one. [Full text]

Doctors’ conscience rights under attack in birth control debate

One physician threatens to give up his practice rather than kill patients

BC Catholic

Deborah Gyapong

Doctors who refuse to prescribe birth control pills have become the focus of a debate over physicians’ rights to freedom of conscience and religion when practising medicine.

An Alberta doctor has been in the media spotlight recently for posting a notice at the clinic where she works she will not prescribe the pill and now faces a human rights complaint. Earlier this year, three Ottawa doctors came under fire for similar reasons. The Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons (CPSO) is doing a public consultation on its guidelines that could be revamped to restrict doctors’ rights to abstain from legal medical practices on religious or conscientious grounds.

For Dr. Howie Bright, past president of the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Societies (CFCPS), the attack on birth control is a “fairly discrete target because it sounds weird that a modern doctor” would not prescribe contraception and is likely to “generate reaction.” [Full text]

Conscience rights for Ontario doctors may be on chopping block again

LifeSite News

Pete Balinski

Ontario’s College of Physicians and Surgeons is looking to update its policy on whether or not a doctor can refuse treatments on religious or moral grounds. The move has life and family advocates concerned doctors may be forced to violate their moral convictions when serving a patient, including one day being forced to participate in or refer for abortion and euthanasia.

“It is dangerous to ask anyone to set aside moral convictions. The greater the power and influence of the person involved, the more dangerous it is,” Sean Murphy, administrator of the Canada-based Protection of Conscience Project, told LifeSiteNews.

The College’s policy review comes at a time when mainstream media has highlighted a number of stories about women complaining that doctors would not prescribe birth control pills, either because of a medical judgment, ethical concerns, or religious beliefs. The reports have consistently sided with the pill-seeking women over the doctors. . . .[Full text]