No law Canada will ever match the Catholic ideal of respect for life, doctor says
By Michael Swan
The Catholic Register
TORONTO (CCN)
Caption: Dr. Bill Sullivan
One of Canada’s two members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, a leading bioethicist and major researcher into disability issues, is urging Catholics to engage legislators to minimize the damage of the new assisted suicide law.
At the same time, Catholics should realize that the Supreme Court has spoken, and no law regulating physician-assisted death in Canada will ever match the Catholic ideal of respect for life, he said.
“Get involved. Continue to communicate the ethical basis of our opposition,” Dr. Bill Sullivan told a small audience of physicians, scholars, and activists at the University of St. Michael’s College April 20.
The founding executive director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute and former president of the International Association of Catholic Bioethicists warned against trying to stop the inevitable.
“The law is not on your side. You can kind of grieve it, but accept it. We lost,” Sullivan said.
His advice at the CCBI and Knights of Malta event was to concentrate on strengthening protections for the vulnerable written into the new law. “This is a very important time, when the legislation is being debated, to get involved,” he said.
“A lot of people, even Catholics, need education on these issues,” he said. “We’re all affected by a culture that is death-denying and idolizes youth and health and independence…. It actually is part of being human to be interdependent.”
The long game for opponents of assisted suicide will be to fund and sponsor high-quality palliative care along with serious research into end-of-life and mental-health issues. In particular, depression among the frail elderly is often not recognized by doctors and poorly understood among researchers, said Sullivan.
“Whenever anybody asks to be made dead, think depression,” he said. Depression is “a treatable illness at any stage of life.”
The debate over assisted dying goes further than cut-and-dried issues of science, medicine, and law. “The Supreme Court is not claiming to make a moral judgment, but they are dealing with a moral issue,” Sullivan said.
