URGENT: Tell Canadian MPs they can't force Christian hospitals to do euthanasia. Sign the petition!
VANCOUVER, March 4, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The BC-based Providence Care Centre issued an internal memo February 16 stating euthanasia and assisted suicide is “contrary” to the Catholic belief that “life is held to be sacred from conception to natural death.”
Therefore, killing patients by euthanasia and assisted suicide is “not permitted” in the Catholic health authority’s institutions, which include Vancouver’s downtown St. Paul’s Hospital.
Similarly, the Catholic Health Sponsors of Ontario, which administers 21 health care institutions, stated in December 2015 that it would not kill patients by legally sanctioned medical means.
But after a special parliamentary committee proposed that publicly funded health care institutions be forced to provide euthanasia and assisted suicide when these become legal June 6, the media has made hay with these declarations, including CBC News revealing with relish the Providence “leaked memo.”
That’s “not unexpected,” says Sean Murphy of the Protection of Conscience Project. The press will “naturally push this kind of thing…If you can fan the flames of controversy, you’re going to increase your readership.”
And while the Supreme Court’s February 2015 Carter decision was highly contentious, “there is one thing that is more controversial than legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide,” he told LifeSiteNews.
That is “compelling people to participate in those procedures they find morally abhorrent.”
The Liberal-dominated committee’s 21 recommendations are intended to provide Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government with a framework to legislate on euthanasia and assisted suicide following the Carter ruling, which struck down current law as unconstitutional.
But the report tabled in Parliament February 25 has been criticized — including a searing denunciation by Toronto’s Cardinal Thomas Collins — as proposing an extreme euthanasia regime that goes far beyond the scope of the Carter ruling and violates the conscience rights of those individuals and institutions opposed to state-sanctioned killing.
And as the Liberals grapple with crafting a law to meet the June 6 deadline, there is a discernible media push of the committee’s agenda in some quarters.
Thus, Globe and Mail’s Wendy Stueck wrote on February 26 that Providence Care Centre receives “millions in public funds,” and quoted Josh Paterson of the BC Civil Liberties Association: “We think the government should say to St. Paul’s: ‘You’ve got to fall in line’.”
And Laura Fraser of the taxpayer funded CBC News quoted similar opinions from a member of the Right to Die Society, in an article Wednesday titled: “When it comes to physician-assisted death, could religious hospitals ethically refuse?”
“People pay taxes in the hope of receiving services which are deemed legal in their country at that time. Physician-assisted suicide will soon be one of these services and to disappoint these people is wrong,” said Ruth von Fuchs.
“They expect it, they have paid for it, they have a right to it.”
Fraser also quoted University of Toronto ethicist Kerry Bowman who declared: “I get it, the purpose of a Catholic institution is to adhere to Catholic beliefs and values. But patients always come before institutional preferences or anything else — I think that has to be our guiding light.”
Bowman conceded that Catholic health care institutions refuse to do abortions, but pregnant women can go elsewhere to have their child killed in utero, whereas “frail” patients wanting to be euthanized are “less mobile.”
“If they’re in a remote area … their rights are really going to be restricted,” he said.
“I can tell you with absolute certainty that every penny of what is called ‘public funding’ comes out of private pockets,” countered Murphy — the pockets, he added, of people both for and against euthanasia, and of Catholics.
And to assert that institutions cannot claim conscience rights is “fallacious,” he said. Institutions are “associations of people or collectives of individuals with a common purpose,” such as the CBC.
“The people who are claiming, whether the Catholic Church or a denomination and so forth, cannot operate collectively with a code of ethics or morality to which it complies, are essentially hypocritical,” he observed, “because in many cases they belong to organizations that do exactly the same thing.”
“Catholic taxpayers have historically expressed the desire to be treated in facilities that embody a Christian anthropology,” noted Michèle Boulva of the Catholic Organization for Life and Family. “We have a right to health care that reflects our own vision of the human person.”
“By the simple fact of allowing Catholic health care institutions to exist and by funding them, the government recognizes and validates their claim to a right to maintain a Catholic identity,” she told LifeSiteNews. “To do otherwise would be a denial of our freedom of religion. It would be discrimination.”
Cardinal Collins likewise decried the committee’s proposal as “religious discrimination that punishes those who so faithfully serve everyone who comes to them.”
“The reality is that we’re in Canada,” where “all health care institutions are publicly funded. That would include all hospices, every nursing home…everything,” pointed out Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.
If this proposal were to become law, “we have to understand there isn’t any safe zones then,” and that the pro-euthanasia agenda would be imposed everywhere.
“You cannot force publicly funded institutions, or physicians who are independent, yet receive their money from the public, to do this,” Schadenberg said. “That is absolutely wrong.”
Murphy emphasizes that the federal committee misread the Carter decision — as often does the press.
“There is no constitutional right to this,” he said. “There is nothing in Carter that states that physician-assisted suicide must be provided by a particular institution or hospital or physician.”
Rather, the Court ruled that the state cannot prevent a “physician who wishes to provide assisted suicide or euthanasia” from doing so “in the circumstances defined by the Court.”
Nor can the state prevent “a patient who meets the criteria in Carter or in subsequent legislation to Carter,” from being euthanized or helped to commit suicide by “a willing physician.”
The Catholic health care institutions did not state they would refuse to transfer patients who insist on being killed in this way, Murphy pointed out.
But he noted the distinction between being compelled to arrange such a transfer, which is morally objectionable, and cooperating with, or not obstructing, a transfer arranged by the patient, or another party.
The Canadian Medical Association opposes the committee report for its disregard for conscience rights, Murphy said. The CMA’s Dr. Jeff Blackmer has repeatedly stressed that protecting conscience rights of those opposed would not impede patients’ access to euthanasia and assisted suicide, as has been shown in the experience of the Netherlands and Belgium.
Because the hospital in his remote BC community has only a limited number of kidney dialysis machines, some people must travel to another town for that medically necessary procedure, Murphy noted. “I would be interested to know what they would do here. Insist they must provide euthanasia and assisted suicide in this hospital, but they don’t have to provide kidney dialysis?”
Meanwhile, the Globe’s Stueck reported that BC Minister of Health Terry Lake said the province can balance patient access to euthanasia and assisted suicide with protection of conscience rights.
“Patients need to have their wishes respected, but we also recognize that providers have deeply held belief systems as well,” he said, “And we think our system can accommodate both of those.”
Added Lake: “This isn’t black and white. You can’t force someone to provide a sensitive service at a time that is so critical to people when they are diametrically opposed to it.”