Parliament Debates Bill C-384 and Motion 388

A few weeks ago, the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition covered two important parliamentary debates on their blog.

First, the debate on Bill C-384 (to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide) didn’t go so well for Francine Lalonde.

Parliamentary procedure states that a private member’s bill receives two hours of debate before being voted on at second reading. C-384 is tentatively scheduled to receive its second hour of debate on November 16, 2009.

Eight Members of Parliament spoke on C-384. Two spoke in favour – Francine Lalonde (BQ), Serge Cardin – (BQ); six opposed the bill – David Anderson (CPC), Hon John McKay (Lib), Jacques Gourde (CPC), Hon Marlene Jennings (Lib), Joe Comartin (NDP), Paul Szabo (Lib).

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition has an overview of all the arguments each MP raised.

The other debate was regarding Motion 388, which we haven’t talked about yet on this blog.

Harold Albrecht MP introduced Motion 388 to encourage the government to clarify Section 241 of the Criminal Code in order to ensure that the law applies to Internet suicide predators.

In March 2008, Nadia Kajouji killed herself after being encouraged and counseled by William Melchert-Dinkel, a licensed practical nurse in Minnesota.

In response to a plea by Kajouji’s mother, Albrecht introduced M388 to clarify the assisted suicide law and to address the crime of online suicide counseling, which has led to Nadia and other young people committing suicide after being urged by predators via the Internet.

The discussion here is fascinating. First of all, there’s the question of whether or not you need Internet-specific laws (I tend to think they’re usually dumb). But, supporters argue that M388 isn’t about treating the Internet as a special case, but rather clarifying that Section 241 also applies to suicide counseling over the Internet.

Then, Serge Ménard (BQ) were particularly curious.

Ménard then continued by stating that suicide is the second leading cause of death in Quebec. He then stated, “We believe that it is important to ensure that counselling or aiding and abetting suicide is an offence, no matter the means used – including telecommunications, the Internet or a computer system.”

As Alex Schadenberg notes, it’s the Bloc that supports Bill C-384, which would “essentially eliminate the protections in Section 241 of the Criminal Code.”

Both posts are an interesting read in their entirety if you’re interested in following these debates in Ottawa.

A Dance of Death

An article by Jean Echlin, A Dance of Death (via Alex Schadenberg):

[...]

Lalonde’s bill states that “medical practitioners” will perform the death procedures. We have no right to ask our professional caregivers to provide us with death. Neither should they ever feel obliged or forced to comply with this request that goes against our essential humanity.

How would anyone know if the person coming into their hospital room with needle and syringe was intent on curing or killing?

This would destroy the trust relationship between patients, families, health care providers and institutions.

Programs of hospice/palliative care provide real hope for those with life-threatening or terminal disease. The cornerstone of excellence in these programs is the management of pain and other distressing symptoms (physical, psycho-spiritual and social). Quality end-of-life care is a priority. Unfortunately only 15 to 20 per cent of Canadians can access this care. Before any discussion of euthanasia or assisted suicide, all Canadians, regardless of age or disease, must have access to palliative care. To do otherwise simply provides a means of health care cost containment.

Recently in Oregon, Barbara Wagner, a 54 year old woman, was denied treatment for lung cancer because of cost, but was offered assisted suicide ($75) by the Oregon department of health. Barbara wanted to live. She has since died.

According to Canadian medical ethicist Margaret Somerville, “The proper goal of medicine and physicians is to kill pain. It is not their role to kill a patient with pain — to become society’s executioners — which is what euthanasia entails, no matter how merciful our reasons. Physicians (and nurses added) must provide adequate pain relief. Leaving a person in pain is really ‘torture by wilful omission.”

[...]

Honestly, read the whole thing.

Canadian Medical Association Opposes Bill C-384

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition reports:

The Canadian Medical Association sent a letter to Members of Parliament today explaining why they oppose Bill C-384, the bill that would legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada. The message was straight forward and written for a general opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Their policy is available here.

The Wilberforce Weekend

via Alex Schadenberg:

The Wilberforce Weekend will examine the culturally transformative campaign by William Wilberforce in England to outlaw slavery. The culturally effective methods that were developed by Wilberforce would then be examined within the framework of changing our cultural attitudes in relation to euthanasia and assisted suicide. This weekend will bring together people from different perspectives

The cost for attending is $99 per person or $49 for students or people with disabilities. To register go to: http://www.manningcentre.ca/en/activity_description/57

Hotel accommodations can be arranged directly at the Novotel Ottawa, 33 Nicholas Street, Ottawa, ON, K1N 9M7, 613-230-3033, www.novotelottawa.com. The group reservation name is Wilberforce Weekend Ottawa, Booking code: 15981. The special rate cut-off date is October 21. The special rate is $119 per night.

The event takes place in Ottawa from Friday, November 13 5:00pm until Saturday, November 14 5:00pm.

Dear Family: Don’t Bump Me Off

A brilliant “memo to my children” from Barbara Kay in light of Bill C-384 (via ProWomanProLife [where else?]). (emphases mine)

My dear family,

As I write to you in September 2009, I am still physically healthy. But since I expect to die in Netherlands-wannabee Quebec, let me be perfectly clear about my wishes in the event that euthanasia has been decriminalized by the time I am suffering a terminal illness, or am languishing in what appears to be intractable chronic pain.

I do not want to be bumped off. I can’t state the case more unequivocally than that. I don’t care if I am a “burden” to you (you were once to me, that’s how life works); I don’t care how long it takes me to die, and how inconvenient that is to the medical system; and I don’t care how selfless an example other parents are setting in graciously exiting the world for their dependents’ sake before nature intended.

[...]

My deathbed physician should be familiar with a 2002 John Hopkins University study indicating that although 45% of terminally ill cancer subjects voiced a wish to die (i. e., subjects meeting the standards of Bill C-384), the wish turned out to be transient in all but 8% of the cases. If all 45% had been euthanized, we wouldn’t know that. So even if I say I want to die, take that as a cry for comfort, reassurance or pain relief, which it almost certainly will be.

[...]

Do not fall for any claptrap about what “your mother would have wanted.” Read my lips: Your mother does not want to be made to feel it is her duty to die before nature decrees, so that others may be freed from care and responsibility, a subtle shift that inevitably follows upon an established “right.”

[...]

Intention is all. I want an unequivocal healer-patient dynamic with my doctor. His or her intention should be to kill my pain, not me. Finally, my doctor should be well versed in palliative care techniques, improving all the time.

And now she has thousands of witnesses in National Post (as well as ProWomanProLife and UTSFL) readers. Brilliant.

Canadians for Care

On Tuesday, we pointed out a great series of articles about Bill C-384, the latest attempt to legalize euthanasia and assisted-suicide in Canada. Andrea Mrozek points us to another website, Canadians for Care, where medical professionals are organizing against the bill. There’s a letter for medical professionals to sign, but they’re also accepting signatures of support from the rest of us, and there’s lots of information about the bill and about the end-of-life debate in general.

(ps have I mentioned how much I love ProWomanProLife lately? Confession: I’m wearing the t-shirt as I type this…)

Catholic Register takes on euthanasia and assisted-suicide

Wow. Last week, the Catholic Register published a series of great articles on euthanasia and assisted-suicide:

• FAQs of euthanasia and assisted suicide
• We owe the dying true death with dignity
• Taking care of the spiritual, psychological and emotional
• A brief history of assisted suicide in Canada
• Palliative care in Canada still has a long way to go
• Opponents line up to defeat Canada assisted-suicide bill

Alex Schadenberg on Deep Sedation

Alex Schadenberg breaks down the problems with deep sedation, when used as a form of “slow” euthanasia:

I want to make it clear that Deep Sedation itself is not a moral problem, it becomes a moral problem when it is done with the intention of causing the persons death, usually by dehydration.

Deep Sedation is a very effective palliative technique for people who are suffering from neuropathic pain. This type of pain is less responsive to morphine. But good palliative care physicians know that you do not need to keep the person sedated until death in order to provide a great benefit for the person. Often a person can be sedated for several days and then allowed to come out of sedation. That person has often experienced a physical relaxation that would allow them to once again be awake but not suffering from intractable pain.

In otherwords, Deep Sedation has benefits and should not be discouraged, when properly used, but deep sedation can be abused whereby the person, who is not yet dying, is sedated and then dehydrated to death. This is a form of “slow” euthanasia.

The importance of palliative care

An important and thoughtful article in the Catholic Register on palliative care:

Michele Chaban doesn’t want the option of asking her doctor to kill her, but she thinks she’s probably going to get it.

Chaban is one of Canada’s leading experts on how we die and the care we provide to the dying. She counsels dying patients and their families and teaches the subject at the University of Toronto and the University of Wales. She has also lived with a spinal cord injury for 26 years.

“I get scared sometimes that somebody is going to say, ‘Well, you’re not really a helpful member of society, and you’re not producing anything, and so we don’t need you any more,’ ” Chaban told The Catholic Register.

Go read the whole thing.

Euthanasia debate heating up in Canada

With Bill C-384 set for debate in parliament in September, public debate on the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide has been heating up during the past few weeks. I’ve been meaning to weigh in with a post, but it’s been hard to keep up, so here’s a round up of some good coverage.

Andrea Mrozek at ProWomanProlife highlights a letter to the editor published in the Ottawa Citizen, written by Jakki Jeffs of Alliance for Life Ontario:

Any doctor worth their salt knows that you do not have to kill someone at the end of life. They know that there is a chasm of difference between the possible secondary effect of pain management, which rarely, but may, hasten death and the actual purposeful intent to kill a patient. We will have the debate, I am sure. It will be headlined with the fearmongering which has kept step with euthanasia’s progress across the globe. We have regressed to the point where we want to judge some lives not worthy of life and, in that judgment, sanction their execution. We will not call it that, of course, in order not to distress societal sensitivities.

Brigitte Pellerin at ProWomanProLife highlights a column by Barbara Kay in the National Post:

We have up until recently assumed that we cannot control life’s end. When that was the case — just as when we used to think we could not control life’s beginning — caretaking for those at the heart of the drama was accepted as everyone’s responsibility. But now we would view late-life sufferers, as we used to consider unwed mothers, as having gotten themselves “in trouble” and in need of a termination to that trouble. Of course, as with abortion, the pregnant woman, or the sufferer pregnant, so to speak, with pain, can choose not to terminate. But then, if that’s your choice, the result of the choice (the baby, the suffering) is also your problem, isn’t it? Because in the case of the sufferer, if you haven’t made a deliberate decision to die, then continuing to live is not a given, something you needn’t concern yourself with; rather, continuing to live then also becomes a deliberate decision, one for which you, not your family and society, are responsible.
[...]
Instead of empowering women, abortion has placed many women in a cleft stick. As Stith notes: “One investigator, Vincent M. Rue, reported in the Medical Science Monitor, that 64% of American women who abort feel pressed to do so by others. Another, Frederica Mathewes-Green in her book Real Choices, discovered that American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children.” If you substitute the words “euthanize” for “abort” and “elderly” or “chronically ill” for “children,” the analogy with end-of-life termination could not be more clear.

Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition highlights an article by Hugh Anderson in the Vancouver Sun:

Wrapped in euphemisms and double-talk, another long step toward making it legal in Canada for doctors to deliberately end the life of patients in certain circumstances has been taken.
[...]
Startlingly also, among those eligible to be legally killed by a doctor might be depressed 18-year-old teenagers who refuse their medications. A doctor would also no longer commit a crime by supplying a lethal dose to enable such depressed teenagers to kill themselves.
[...]
It’s all a long way from what many people think of as a suitable case for euthanasia: an elderly person who is terminally ill and in excruciating pain who repeatedly and unmistakably asks for death. There is probably the support of most Canadians for exempting your doctor from a murder charge in that strictly limited case.

This kind of obfuscation is a striking characteristic of campaigners for the so-called “right to die with dignity,” which in reality means making it legal for somebody else to kill you or to help you commit suicide.

And on the topic of the slippery slope dangers:

Consider the Netherlands, where so-called mercy killing has been formally legal since 2002 and factually legal for three decades. Several government reports have acknowledged that many people have been legally euthanized without their knowledge or consent.

In Oregon, state officials have conceded that they really don’t know how many people have been prescribed a lethal dose of drugs to kill themselves, only those that have been reported by doctors.

Anderson does a good job of dissecting the specifics of the bill as well, so do read the whole thing.

Alex Schadenberg also dismantles a problematic article about Quebec physicians proposing legal euthanasia, arguing that this is about protecting doctors, not helping patients, and that the effect would be “erasing the distinction between caring for people and killing people.”

It’s important to stay on top of this issue as we head into the fall. We’ll be doing our best to keep you updated.