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doctor assisted suicide
Advance directives are legal documents that allow patients to spell out their wishes concerning end-of-life care. When medical decisions are required, the document helps to avoid confusion about one's true desires in case of ailing health or incapacity.
Bill C-14, the government's response to the Carter v. Canada Supreme Court ruling on medical assistance in dying, is generating a lot of criticism from diametrically opposed perspectives -- those who think it too permissive and those who think it is too restrictive.
One would hope that every patient whose angst expresses itself as a wish to die would have access to palliative care expertise, including a thorough and detailed evaluation of the physical, psychosocial, existential and spiritual drivers motivating their request for hastened death.
The provinces hold a lot of power.
If physician-hastened death is part of the continuum of medicine, then we must treat it as such. Like any other new treatment or clinical innovation, it demands careful evaluation and methodological rigor, including fixed eligibility criteria, detailed data collection, objective monitoring of outcomes and tracking of adverse effects; the ability to analyze cumulative data, with incremental ramping up entirely based on preceding trial outcomes. We would insist on no less stringency for anything else.
In any assisted-dying regime, a competent patient is free to change their mind or express their ambivalence by withdrawing a request or postponing an assisted death. To permit an assisted death to proceed on the basis of an advance directive effectively denies this protection to persons who are no longer capable of making or expressing health-care decisions.
“If we have a truly diverse and richly inclusive community, it is very important that people of conscience not be forced into doing things..."
Canadian opinion on the question of whether physicians should be allowed, by law, to help end the lives of people who no longer wish to live is intricately nuanced. The Trudeau government must demonstrate a grasp of how complex the issue is, and how the individual moral codes of Canadians impact their thinking.
Over three-quarters of the country is in favour.
A panellist chosen to help guide federal government on how to implement doctor-assisted dying is dismissing concerns of bias.
