Tag: Udo Schuklenk

Canadian nurse forced out for refusing to participate in euthanasia

Lifesite News

Pete Baklinski

PALMER RAPIDS, Ontario, June 14, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — A Canadian nurse no longer has her job helping the sick and the elderly after she was told that she must either assist patients who wanted to kill themselves using the country’s new euthanasia law, or resign.

Mary Jean Martin, a Registered Nurse who worked in middle-management as a Homecare Coordinator in Ontario, said she became a nurse in the late 1980s to help the “vulnerable and the struggling,” not to be a link in a chain that would ultimately lead to a patient’s death.

“Can you imagine being a nurse and being told that you have to help kill someone? That’s so against the philosophy of nursing and it’s so against the heart of the healthcare person,” she told LifeSiteNews in an exclusive interview. . . [Full text]

 

Health care workers bring case for conscience rights to Ontario legislature

Catholic Register

Michael Swan

Armed with letters of support from religious community leaders, plus the official positions of the Ontario, Canadian and American Medical Associations, health care professionals descended on Queen’s Park May 18 in support of a Progressive Conservative private members’ bill that would shield doctors from punishment by the College of Physicians and Surgeons and other regulatory bodies if they refuse to refer for medically assisted suicide.

As the doctors entered the provincial legislature at 9 a.m., security staff warned the doctors they would not be allowed to sit in the public gallery that rings the law makers if they wear their scrubs, as that would be considered a form of protest.

Wearing her scrubs, Concerned Ontario Doctors president Dr. Kulvinder Gill made the case for Conservative health critic Jeff Yurek’s Bill 129 at a 9:45 a.m. press conference. . . [Full text]

 

On assisted suicide, let’s remember that doctors have rights too

Waterloo Region Record

Luisa D’Amato

Physicians are supposed to save lives, not hasten death.

So it’s not surprising that some doctors are having problems seeing how they fit into Canada’s new law that legalizes physician-assisted suicide for some patients.

It turns out that conscientious objectors like Sandra Brickell, a physician who works in Kitchener hospitals, are not protected.

“When somebody wants to end their life, it goes against what we’ve been trained to do,” she said at a meeting Friday with several other doctors, Kitchener-Conestoga MP Harold Albrecht and Kitchener-Conestoga MPP Michael Harris. . . [Full Text]

 

Doctors needed. Leave your conscience at home

 National Post

Marni Soupcoff

In a new paper, two prominent bioethicists suggest that all doctors should be required to see to it personally that any medical procedure — including abortions and assisted suicides — be performed for patients who request and qualify for them.

This should be the case, the authors argue, despite any personal moral or religious qualms the doctors may have about the operations or prescriptions in question. Sadly for devout Catholics, evangelical Protestants or others with deep religious or moral convictions, the prospect of medical school itself would be completely off the table if co-authors Udo Schuklenk and Julian Savulescu had their way; they argue that medical students should be screened for over-active consciences when it comes to things like contraception, abortion and euthanasia. Apparently those for whom these issues are anything but no-brainers shouldn’t be considered acceptable physician material at all. . . [Full text]

 

Ban conscientious objection by Canadian doctors, urge ethicists in volatile commentary

National Post

Tom Blackwell

Authorities should bar doctors from refusing to provide such services as abortion and assisted death on moral grounds, and screen out potential medical students who might impose their values on patients, leading Canadian and British bioethicists argue in a provocative new commentary.

The paper by professors at Queen’s and Oxford universities, who are also editors of two major bioethics journals, throws rocket fuel onto a debate already inflamed by the new law allowing assisted death.

They argue that physicians have no right to opt out of lawful medical services — from abortion to prescribing contraceptives — that are requested by a patient and in the person’s interest.

Those who let conscientious objection affect patient care are clearly unprofessional, say Udo Schuklenk and Julian Savulescu.

“Doctors must put patients’ interests ahead of their own integrity,” they write in the journal Bioethics. . . [Full text]