RE: Supreme Court ruling on assisted suicide
How sad that the options for Canadians who are severely ill or dying appear to have been reduced to two choices: either suffer a painful and “undignified” death, or ask your doctor for a lethal drug. So it would seem by the gleeful reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the ban against physician-assisted suicide.
Lost in the argument is the pressing need to improve access to hospice palliative care, including proper pain and symptom management, for all Canadians. Rather than hastening death for persons who are ill or dying, we should be doing a much better job of supporting them with high quality palliative care, which improves quality of life for dying patients and offers a healing experience for them and their families. It is shameful how few people in Canada can access palliative care.
To instead allow physicians to help patients kill themselves (after 2,400 years of “doing no harm” under the Hippocratic tradition) has many troubling implications. What about the freedom of conscience rights of physicians who refuse to do so? The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan has already drafted a policy requiring physicians who object to providing “legally permissible and publicly-funded health services” to make a referral to another physician (which is as morally problematic as doing the procedure itself). If another physician is unavailable in a timely manner, the policy requires the physician to provide the service “even where the provision of health services conflicts with physicians’ deeply held and considered moral or religious beliefs.” (The College is open to input until Mar. 6.)
Physician-assisted suicide is not just a religious issue. Eliminating a life is not an appropriate response to suffering. How will this call for state-sanctioned (physician-assisted) suicide undermine our commitment to suicide prevention programs? How can we prevent the erosion of the original constraints on physician-assisted suicide when they have been abused and eroded elsewhere? How will allowing doctors to help patients die impact the trust between patients and doctors?
Rights must always be balanced against responsibilities. We have a responsibility as a caring society to respect and protect people who are disabled, elderly, terminally ill, mentally ill, or otherwise vulnerable. Respect for life – all life – ought to trump respect for individual autonomy.
Therese Jelinski
Saskatoon
