Ontario physician first to announce plans to quit medicine due to demand for referral for euthanasia

Sean Murphy*

Moral imperialism by state authorities in Canada is beginning to take its toll.  A physician in Strathroy, Ontario, has publicly announced that she will not be renewing her licence to practise medicine because the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario demands that she must either kill patients or help them commit suicide, or arrange for someone else to do so.

The College policy is a response to the 2015 Supreme Court of Canada ruling in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General).

Writing in the professional journal Canadian Family Physician in response to an article by Dr. Stephen Genuis (Emerging assault on freedom of conscience), Dr. Nancy Naylor thanked him for eloquently expressing her thoughts.  She states that mandatory referral for euthanasia or assisted suicide is “an assault on my integrity and ethics as a physician.”

Dr. Naylor has been a family physician for 37 years and has been exclusively providing palliative care for the past three years.

“I have no wish to stop,” she writes.  “But I will not be told that I must go against my moral conscience to provide standard of care.”