Tag: Margaret Somerville

Should doctors have the right to refuse to prescribe birth control because of their religious beliefs?

CBC Radio

Day 6

Last week Joan Chand’oiseau was outraged to learn that the physician at her Calgary walk-in clinic refused to prescribe birth control because of her religious beliefs. Chand’oiseau’s story broke just after Canada’s largest medical regulator – The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario – announced it would be revisiting its policies on physicians and the Human Rights Code.  We check in with Joan Chand’oiseau, and invite  Margaret Somerville, Director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, and Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, to debate whether doctors should have the right to refuse to treat a patient on religious or moral grounds.

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Policy allowing doctors to deny treatment on moral or religious grounds under review

Globe and Mail

Kelly Grant

Doctors who refuse to provide certain treatments on religious or moral grounds must tread delicately or risk trampling human-rights laws, according to the chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which is expected to weigh in soon on a review of professional guidelines for physicians practising in Canada’s largest province.

“First and foremost their job is to provide health-care services to people who require them,” Barbara Hall said. “If [doctors] wish to put forward their own human rights as a barrier to doing that then they may come up against the fact that their rights are not absolute.”

In an interview, Ms. Hall said doctors generally do not enjoy the same legal protections as religious officials – a point her commission underlined to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) when the medical regulator last updated its policy on doctors and the human-rights code in 2008. . . [Full text]

Hearings on Quebec Bill 52: Professor Margaret Somerville

Wednesday, 9 October 2013 – Vol. 43 N° 45

Note: The following translation is the product of a first run through Google Translate.  In most cases it is sufficient to identify statements of interest, but more careful translation is required to properly understand the text.  Translation block numbers (T#) have been assigned by the Project as references to facilitate analysis and discussion.

Original Text

T#

Caution: raw machine translation
15H (version non révisée)
Unrevised version
(Reprise à 15 h 10)
Le Président (M. Bergman): À l’ordre, s’il vous plaît! La commission reprend ses travaux. Je demande à toutes les personnes dans la salle de bien vouloir éteindre leurs téléphones cellulaires. 001 The Chairman (Mr. Bergman): Order, please! The committee resumed. I ask everyone in the room to please turn off their cell phones.
Nous allons poursuivre, sans plus tarder, les consultations particulières et les auditions publiques sur le projet de loi no. 52, Loi concernant les soins de fin de vie. 002 We will continue, without further ado, the special consultations and public hearings on the Bill. 52, An Act respecting the end-of-life.
Je souhaite la bienvenue à notre invitée, qui s’exprime en anglais. Et vous avez la possibilité d’avoir la traduction avec les items devant vous. 003 Welcome to our guest, who speaks English. And you can have the translation with the items before you.

Caution: raw machine translation

Original Text
Le Président (M. Bergman): Mme Somerville, je vous souhaite la bienvenue à la Commission des services sociaux et de santé. Je comprends que vous serez vous exprimer sur une présentation de 15 minutes, suivie de la … collègues … mes collègues des deux côtés de la Chambre. Tous les côtés de la Chambre auront une chance de vous poser quelques questions. Donc, si vous pouviez nous donner votre nom et votre titre, et aller de l’avant avec la présentation de 15 minutes. Je vous remercie. 004 Le Président (M. Bergman): Mrs. Somerville, I want to welcome you to the Health and Social services Commission. I understand that you’ll be expressing yourself on a presentation of 15 minutes, followed the… colleagues… my colleagues on both sides of the House. All sides of the House will have a chance to ask you some questions. So, if you could just give us your name and your title, and go ahead with your presentation of 15 minutes. Thank you.
Mme Somerville (Margaret): Je vous remercie, Monsieur le Président. Mon nom est Margaret Somerville, je suis la chaire Samuel Gale en droit, professeur à la Faculté de médecine, fondateur et directeur du Centre McGill pour la médecine, éthique et droit, tous à l’Université McGill à Montréal. 005 Mme Somerville (Margaret):Thank you, Mr. President. My name is Margaret Somerville, I’m the Samuel Gale Professor of Law, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Founding Director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, all at McGill University in Montréal.

Full Translation

Quebec euthanasia proposal challenged as unbalanced

Margaret Somerville, founding Director of McGill University’s Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, criticizes the report of Quebec’s Select Committee on Dying with Dignity on the ground that it is unbalanced “and reads rather like a pro-euthanasia manifesto.”  She notes that two thirds of the submissions received by the Committee opposed euthansia. [The Gazette]

 

Down the Slope to Infanticide

Nurses At Foothills Hospital Rebel Over The Horrifying Results Of Late-Term ‘Genetic Terminations’

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Marnie Ko

Genetic terminations unquestionably constitute murder in the minds of the Foothills nurses who contacted this magazine after hospital administrators demanded they assist with abortions. The nurses are backed by a February 26 administrative memo obtained by this  magazine which states that for Maternity Care Centre (MCC) staff, “not participating in terminations is not an option.”

At Calgary’s Foothills Hospital some premature infants are born alive, then routinely allowed to die. For instance, last  August a doctor told a mother-to-be that her baby suffered from lethal genetic defects. The mother was persuaded to undergo a “genetic
termination,” and a regularly used procedure called an induction abortion was performed only five weeks before the baby was due. Chemically induced labour was followed by a live birth. But because the mother had decided her child should not live, nurses were forbidden to provide even such basics as food and fluids. [Full text]