The hubris underlying a campaign aimed at forcing Catholic hospitals to allow euthanasia on their premises is breathtaking to behold.
As if the euthanasia net in Canada isn’t widening fast enough, Dying with Dignity has decided it needs a helping hand, and what better place to stir things up than a religious health-care institution where the concept of medical staff ending the lives of patients in house is morally repugnant.
The B.C. chapters of the pro-assisted-suicide group, having determined there’s no better way to help suffering individuals, wants to bring death to them more quickly and closer to home, in a religious facility where end-of-life care means caring for the patient, not dispatching them with a lethal injection.
The campaign is distorted on so many levels. For one thing, the religious rights of faith-based institutions, and of individuals who practise their faith through them, is well established in Canada. “The freedom of religion of individuals cannot flourish without freedom of religion for the organizations through which those individuals express their religious practices and through which they transmit their faith,” the Supreme Court of Canada said in the 2015 Loyola High School case.
Dying With Dignity says British Columbians’ access to assisted suicide is being “unfairly restricted by an outdated agreement” between the provincial government and the Denominational Health Association. But the only thing outdated is the organization’s religious intolerance that refuses to acknowledge more than 150 years of interwoven religion and health care in Canada. Catholic religious orders were providing compassionate care to the sick and dying years before Canada was a nation. They founded hundreds of Catholic hospitals across the country, with many like St. Paul’s in Vancouver still serving the public today.
It’s not as if there is any rationale for making euthanasia more broadly available. Patients who want to die at the hands of a doctor are accommodated compassionately with a transfer to another facility.
To take advantage of faith-based institutions and try to crush their religious rights solely to increase the already out-of-control rate at which euthanasia is expanding in Canada demonstrates that Dying With Dignity is more about dying than dignity.