Euthanasia proponents may find themselves robbed of choice at end of life, says doctor
By Deborah Gyapong
OTTAWA (CCN)
Euthanasia and assisted suicide advocates may find themselves robbed of choice when it comes to end of life decisions, warned Dr. Williard Johnston, chairman of Canadian Physicians for Life.
“Suicide advocates suffer from a combination of naivete and boundless confidence, when they get to the situation when they are at end of life or have a significant disability, if they think that all the choices going to be their choices, not their caregivers’ choices,” said Dr. Johnston, who also heads the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of B.C.
In a conference call April 13 on the eve of the tabling of assisted-death legislation in Ottawa, Dr. Johnston shared the story of a court case involving a patient he called “Uncle Matt.”
His niece phoned Dr. Johnston saying she “couldn’t understand why the hospital was starving and dehydrating her uncle to death.”
“Uncle Matt,” a “vigorous 80-year-old,” had suffered a stroke while on a hunting trip. He was put on a feeding tube to help him during the recovery stage when swallowing was difficult. The feeding tube fell out and “Uncle Matt’s” daughter did not give her approval for it to be put back in, said Johnston.
The uncle croaked that he was thirsty, but the hospital told the niece and her husband to go away. The niece and her husband then abducted “Uncle Matt” and took him to another hospital, which was reluctant to keep him. An emergency court hearing was called to obtain an injunction to rehydrate “Uncle Matt,” but “at the very time of the judge hearing evidence from Matt’s family, Matt died,” Dr. Johnston said.
This case shows the hospital system is “simply not equipped to figure out what is going on at home, when there are relatives who would rather you be dead,” he said. In Matt’s case there were “millions of dollars they would rather have in their control.”
Any physician with a busy practice can become overworked, and regulatory requirements end up taking a back seat, he warned. “It takes an administrative rigour to ensure something as specific as the Supreme Court of Canada’s injunctions in the Carter case actually get carried out in the trenches.”
Dr. Johnston said the expansion of euthanasia and assisted suicide is inevitable, based on what is going on in Europe. Recently a couple: Francois, 80, and Anne, 86, who had no specific illnesses and were not terminally ill, decided to be euthanized together after none of their three adult children said they would be willing to look after the survivor if one died first.
“These kinds of couple suicides, when they start to be contemplated, call out for intelligent social intervention, not an arranged death.”
On the same conference call, constitutional lawyer and litigation expert Albertos Polizogopoulos, who represented the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, Catholic physicians, and a group of health care organizations intervening in the Carter case, explained the Supreme Court did not create a positive right to assisted suicide, as many claim.
“The Carter decision was decided on the facts of the case,” he said, noting that all the Supreme Court did in the case of Ms. Carter was to say that because of her circumstances, a degenerative disease that would progress to the point where she could not commit suicide herself, the law posed a risk to her right to life by forcing her to consider committing suicide earlier while she was still able.
“That is not a finding of a positive right,” Polizogopoulos said.
There has been a “broad mischaracterization” of the Carter decision, he said, noting that both the joint-Parliamentary Committee and the Provincial Territorial panel “sought to widen and expand what Carter contemplated.”
