Pulse
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November 5, 2015 (NationalReview) — When a palliative care center in Quebec announced it would not offer euthanasia, the Minister of Health ominously told it, “Yes you will!”

And so it has come to pass. The Center will now be one of the first to kill patients under Quebec’s euthanasia law. From the Leader Post story:

The centre says on its website that while it initially refused to offer the service, it recently changed its position after consulting staff and volunteers.

It says that 60 per cent participated in an online poll on the issue, and of those, 61 per cent were in favour of helping terminally ill patients who wish to end their life.

The centre’s board of directors voted unanimously in support to allow medically assisted suicide as a last resort when all other means of pain relief have been exhausted.

A few points:

  • As designed by the great medical humanitarian, Dame Cecily Saunders, suicide prevention was to be one of the crucial services offered by hospice. That upholds the equal dignity of patients and demonstrates that hospice is about living, not dying.
  • Does anyone really believe the center will only kill when “nothing else can be done?” That is not the case anywhere assisted suicide or euthanasia are legal. What a load of manure.
  • The Quebec law does not permit assisted suicide. The death must be by euthanasia, called “aid in dying.”
  • Once the Canadian Supreme Court’s ruling comes into effect, it won’t be limited to the terminally ill, and will be available for a diagnosable condition that causes psychological suffering.
  • This is an example of how the government will force all doctors to be complicit in medicalized killing.

I am astonished–and appalled–at the apparent moral abdication of Canada’s doctors in the face of the Supreme Court’s judicial tyranny, and in this situation, government pressure (because, face it, that is what really happened).

Polls show most Canadian physician’s oppose providing assisted suicide. If these doctors all participated in a declared and courageous policy of total non-cooperation​, it could still hold back the death tide–and serve as a powerful method of public education of why euthanasia is wrong and what can be done for people experiencing serious health problems.

That requires the many to resist, not the few who can be bulldozed.

If the palliative care center is any indication of what is coming, Canada’s patients are in big trouble, for they will be without the last defense against the euthanasia wolves.

Reprinted with permission from National Review