New poll shows disconnect between recent federal report and the mind of the public
By Agnieszka Krawczynski
The B.C. Catholic
Most people want strict limits on assisted suicide when it becomes legal, according to a recent poll.
LifeCanada, a national pro-life organization, published this finding after commissioning a 46-question survey in March.
“We really wanted to be able to offer some kind of sense of where the public is because the polling coming out of Dying with Dignity paints a very bleak picture from our perspective,” said executive director Natalie Sonnen.
“We really wanted to have data that could counteract that and show a much more balanced sense of things.”
The LifeCanada poll found 50 per cent of respondents think doctors or nurses should be legally allowed to end a patient’s life only in grievous and irremediable circumstances and with strict limits.
Thirty-one per cent said doctors or nurses could end the lives of their patients under other circumstances, and 10 per cent said it should not be legal at all. Only nine per cent said assisted suicide should be available whenever a patient requests it.
“The majority want it for the terminally ill and extremely irremediable conditions. This is really where the mind of the public is,” Sonnen said.
“Where the elites and the legislators are at, they are wanting euthanasia on demand. They are thinking, ‘We want to open this up for anybody at any age, for any reason.'”
Sonnen is convinced her poll, carried out with Public Square Research and the Angus Reid Forum, digs deeper into what people think. It asked questions about the morality of assisted suicide, protection for the vulnerable, and conscience rights for doctors and religious institutions.
It found 48 per cent of respondents would support assisted suicide only for the terminally ill. Thirty-one per cent would extend it to chronically ill adults and between 20 and 23 per cent would allow it for physically disabled adults, chronically depressed adults, elderly people with dementia, and disabled or chronically ill minors, if consent was given.
Nine per cent consistently said it should not be legal under any circumstance.
“What generated a lot of the questions for this poll was the committee report” released Feb. 25, Sonnen said. It gave 21 recommendations for assisted suicide, including allowing doctors to euthanize minors and requiring all publicly funded health-care institutions to assist in suicides whether or not they agreed with the practice.
“You see the discrepancy in what our elites are saying and what the public believes,” Sonnen said.
A strong majority, 69 per cent, of respondents said medical professionals should not be obliged to kill their patients if it was against their moral beliefs, and 65 per cent said religious institutions shouldn’t either if it was against their religious beliefs.
Those numbers were even higher among seniors: 81 per cent said doctors against assisted suicide shouldn’t be obliged to do it, and 73 per cent said religious institutions shouldn’t have to participate.
Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, sensed most people were concerned about conscience rights when he wrote an open letter to politicians in February.
“No Catholic … can in good conscience support, work towards, or promote access to suicide, assisted suicide, or euthanasia,” he wrote on behalf of a community of 430,000 Catholics.
“Many British Columbians of other religious or ethical traditions agree with us.”
The archbishop also called for strong protections for the vulnerable, something that surfaced as a large concern in the poll. Half of respondents said protecting the vulnerable was more important to them than ensuring access.
Eleven per cent said there is no way to ensure the vulnerable are protected.
“People are fully aware that some vulnerable people will die who did not ask for death,” Sonnen said.
Full results of the poll can be viewed at www.lifecanada.org.
