A law professor makes much ado
Sean Murphy*
In a column in the on-line magazine iPolitics,1 University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran asserts that the “corrosive hostility” of the Canadian Medical Association to “physician-assisted dying” is evident in its “cowardly and stupid” position on the procedure. He claims that the Association “all but threatened” the Supreme Court of Canada that “doctors would rise up” to block it.
In his telling, ever since the Court ignored the threat and struck down the law, the CMA has been acting like a “sore loser,” trying to persuade physicians not to participate. As evidence, he quotes a CMA policy recommendation: “Physicians are not obligated to fulfil requests for assisted dying.” And he complains that the CMA won’t force physicians unwilling to kill patients or help them commit suicide to find someone who will.
Now, the CMA also states that all eligible people should have access to the services without undue delay, and physicians will work with others to ensure access to them,2 but Professor Attaran ignores this. His analysis of CMA policy is simple and scathing. Some physicians, he says, are “bigots,” and the CMA is siding with “those bigots” rather than with patients.
Professor Attaran identifies the bigots: physicians who believe that killing patients or helping them commit suicide is gravely wrong, or at least a bad idea, even in the circumstances defined by the Supreme Court. Those whom Professor Attaran denounces as bigots include physicians who believe they are ethically obliged to compassionately accompany and support dying patients, but not to kill them.
On the contrary, says Professor Attaran, they are “duty-bound” to kill patients or help them commit suicide precisely because the Supreme Court “pointedly” approved “physician-assisted suicide.”* If physicians won’t help patients commit suicide, he rages, “then who does the CMA think should be obliged to help – elves, maybe?”
To which any number of physicians have already replied, “Not elves, but lawyers.”
[iPolitics version- Doctors aren’t obliged — legally or otherwise — to help people die]