Tag: Ellen Wiebe

No Other Options

Newly revealed documents depict a Canadian euthanasia regime that efficiently ushers the vulnerable to a “beautiful” death.

New Atlantis

Alexander Raikin

“I find that the act of offering the option of an assisted death is one of the most therapeutic things we do,” Stefanie Green tells me. She sees it in the faces of her patients — they’re “relieved.” Sometimes it actually means they’ll choose to live longer, to keep fighting, because now they know they can end their suffering if it becomes intolerable.

I wanted to know if Green, a physician specializing in euthanasia in British Columbia, is finding her job easier now than she did at first. “Is it more normal for me to be writing scripts and picking up lethal drugs and driving across town and doing this?” she asks back. It’s a rhetorical question. “Yeah, it’s oddly okay for me to be doing that. I don’t find it shocking anymore, but the events are still extraordinary.”

Green has her own term for these extraordinary events, drawing on her prior experience as an obstetrician, when she helped bring people into the world. “At both ‘deliveries,’ as I call them, I am invited into a most intimate moment in people’s lives,” she writes in her book.

The procedure, she assures me on our call, is “100 percent effective.” If her patient asks to die, and if her schedule, her ethics, and the law permits it, she will administer a lethal injection. . . continue reading

From dementia to medically assisted death: A Canadian woman’s journey, and the dilemma of the doctors who helped

The Globe and Mail

Kelly Grant

To give Alzheimer’s patient Mary Wilson the death she sought, her physicians had to make a tough decision in a short time – and risked going to prison if they got it wrong. Now they’ve been cleared of wrongdoing in a decision that could have wide-reaching implications for tens of thousands of Canadians. . . [Full text]

Vancouver doctor cleared of wrongdoing in probe into assisted death at Orthodox Jewish nursing home

The Globe and Mail

Kelly Grant

British Columbia’s physician regulator has cleared a doctor of any wrongdoing for sneaking into an Orthodox Jewish nursing home that forbids assisted death and ending the life of a resident who wanted to die in his own bed.

In a letter dated July 5, 2019, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia (CPSBC) dismissed an official complaint against Ellen Wiebe, saying the Vancouver doctor did not break any of the regulator’s rules when she helped Barry Hyman, 83, die inside the Louis Brier Home and Hospital. . . [Full text]

B.C. doctor cleared of wrongdoing for providing assisted death to woman who starved herself

Globe and Mail

Kelly Grant

British Columbia’s physician regulator has cleared a doctor of any wrongdoing for providing medical aid in dying to a woman who did not qualify for the procedure until she starved herself to the brink of death.

A committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia (CPSBC) found that Ellen Wiebe did not break the regulator’s rules when she helped a 56-year-old patient known as Ms. S to die last year.

The case is the first to be made public in which a medical regulator has ruled on the contentious question of whether doctors should grant assisted deaths to patients who only satisfy all the criteria of the federal law after they stop eating and drinking.

“It was determined that Ms. S met the requisite criteria and was indeed eligible for medical assistance in dying, despite the fact that her refusal of medical treatment, food, and water, undoubtedly hastened her death and contributed to its ‘reasonable foreseeability,'” the college’s inquiry committee wrote in a Feb. 13 report. . . . [Full text]

 

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]