Assisted suicide goes against our values: CEO
By Agnieszka Krawczynski
The B.C. Catholic
Caption: St. Paul’s Hospital.
A Catholic health-care organization is not backing down on its ethical principles, despite backlash on its stand on assisted suicide.
Providence Health Care, based in Vancouver, says killing patients is not something it intends to do.
“Anything that is hastening the death of an individual is so fundamentally in opposition to our Catholic values and moral teachings,” CEO Dianne Doyle told The B.C. Catholic.
Thousands of PHC staff members received a memo Feb. 16 saying as much: “At the most fundamental level, physician-assisted dying contradicts the basic tenets of Catholic health care, wherein life is held to be sacred from conception to natural death, and not permitted in Catholic health-care institutions such as Providence.”
It also calls assisted suicide legislation “uncharted territory” and says patients or residents requesting it at any of PHC’s 16 health care sites before laws are written will be dealt with on a “case-by-case basis.”
The memo came out nine days before a parliamentary committee released 21 recommendations for legislation. Its report suggests all publicly funded hospitals be required to provide assisted suicide.
When the press picked up the PHC memo, a storm of criticism swept in from the public, some even calling on the organization to change its mind or close.
“The recommendations do not change our position in any way,” Doyle replied.
“We continue to make our position clear that we will do everything we possibly can do to support anybody at end of life in terms of alleviation of pain and suffering, but do not see the hastening of death as part of a continuum of a palliative-care approach, and certainly would not be participating in anything that hastens death.”
She added that it’s too early to know what new legislation will mean for Catholic hospitals.
Other Catholic hospitals in B.C. have also said they won’t participate in assisted suicide.
St. Joseph’s Hospital, the only hospital in the Comox valley, is the only Catholic hospital on Vancouver Island.
“Our position on physician-assisted death is consistent with the Catholic Health Care Ethical Guidelines, and St. Joseph’s will not be providing or promoting physician-assisted death,” president and CEO Jane Murphy told the CBC.
This came out after a doctor at St. Joseph’s, Jonathan Reggler, said he is willing to assist in the suicides of his patients.
Murphy hopes “that legislation will respect the diverse perspectives on physician-assisted death.”
