Timeline of a campaign against religious health care

It’s been nearly three weeks since controversy arose surrounding a young woman who was transferred from St. Paul’s Hospital so she could be euthanized in a non-Catholic facility.

St. Paul’s routinely arranges such transfers, but in this case the woman’s parents spoke up and the media have taken up the cause with the enthusiasm of a war on unspeakable injustice.

That means pulling out all the stops and doing more reporting on the death of Sam O’Neill than they’ve done about years of MAiD deaths and abuses. In excess of 13,000 Canadians now die every year with the help of the state, but people who are so desperate that they see a lethal injection as their best option don’t generate news stories.

Accounts of veterans being offered MAiD and homeless people asking for assisted suicide also don’t count. Any journalist is only too eager to cover institutional failure or report on the social state’s inadequacies. But a lonely senior who signs up for MAiD so she won’t burden her children – who also don’t want to be burdened? Journalists would no sooner write about that than about a 19-year-old who wants to keep her baby despite pressure to abort from boyfriend and family.

On the other hand, they know a good story when they see one, and a patient who has to be transferred because the Catholic hospital compassionately looking after her doesn’t want her to die in its care … that’s a good story. 

The result has been a tsunami of coverage about such a moral travesty. Indignant columnists and op-ed writers are demanding the B.C. government tear up the Master Agreement between the province and the Denominational Health Association that guarantees religious providers they can maintain their ethical principles.

To his credit, Health Minister Adrian Dix was initially relaxed about the matter when reporters asked him how severe a beating he planned to give Providence.

Taking a more or less neutral stance, he said hospital transfers occur in about .2 per cent of cases and the hospital did what it was supposed to. He called St. Paul’s “one of the great hospitals in B.C.” but also said the province’s “provision of MAiD services” is second to none in Canada.

As for the master agreement, he said having faith-based health-care partners “overall benefits us.”

That should have been the end of the story, but the media were just warming up. They took the narrative in new and exciting directions by interviewing partisan experts who were “outraged” and demanded the government take on the Catholic Church.

They found people whose loved ones had also been transferred and who described how stressful it was to participate in their death when it wasn’t in the building of their choice.

Opinion pieces overflowed with spleen – and inaccuracies – and op-eds offered advice on how easily the master agreement could be torn up. (One was written by a law professor who, the newspaper neglected to mention, had been part of the legal team that succeeded in having euthanasia decriminalized.)

There were interviews with a palliative care doctor – who also euthanizes her patients – about quitting her job at a hospice because she wasn’t allowed to kill her patients there.

With brilliant timing, Dying with Dignity Canada commissioned a poll to show Canadians support access to MAID. Then Health Canada announced $560,000 in funding for a project to ask Canadians about their experiences with medical assistance in dying.

It used to be that journalists professed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Today’s afflicted are Canadians who are on tomorrow’s MAiD list, some of whom don’t know it or don’t want to be.

Since the legalization of euthanasia in Canada The B.C. Catholic has reported on patients being coerced toward assisted suicide, as well as individuals euthanized without their consent. Some of the vulnerable now carry cards and tape signs on their wall that read, “Do Not Euthanize Me.”

If “dying with dignity” promoters in the media get their way, all those patients in religious health-care facilities who are currently safe, knowing the next lethal injection isn’t coming for them, will lose that assurance.

Next week, Part 2: What constitutes a moral crisis in health care? 

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