Doctor Assisted Suicide: What should the Harper government do next?
Introduction
For our project we chose what the government’s next move on legalized assisted suicide should be to follow through with the decision to legalize Physician assisted suicide. We believe it would be beneficial to set up strict guidelines for the provinces to follow at their own discretion. Doctor assisted suicide is suicide committed with the aid of a physician. Suicide was considered a criminal offence in Canada until 1972, after which it was removed from the Criminal Code. Following the Supreme Court of Canada decision Carter v Canada (AG), released February 6, 2015, physician-assisted suicide is legal in Canada pending a twelve-month period of suspension. The court suspended its ruling for 12 months to allow the government to come up with new rules and regulations. Our opinion is that there are going to have to be strict decisions on how it works. What kind of regulations should be in place? What drugs should the doctor use, at what doses?How should he administer it? What should be the standard of care? When should we say no to someone who wants assisted suicide? What should we take away from other countries that have legalized assisted suicide? These are the types of questions that the government has to answer when thinking of the future of legalized assisted suicide. The big challenge was finding unbiased information as this touchy topic and peoples’ emotions can cloud their judgment and critical thinking.
Option 1: Physician-assisted suicide should not be permitted
Option 2: Physician assisted suicide should be permitted
The first option states that within the realm of palliative care, there exists a well-recognized paradox that one can die healed. Physicians have a duty to uphold the sacred healing space — not destroy it. Supporters of physician-assisted suicide justify their position by placing the value of individual autonomy above all other values and ethical considerations. Permitting physician-assisted suicide creates a slippery slope that unavoidably leads to expanded access to assisted suicide interventions — and abuses. The 2011 annual report on the Death with Dignity Act in Oregon shows that physicians were present at fewer than 10% of “assisted deaths. For palliative care to remain a healing intervention, it cannot include “therapeutic homicide”.
The second option states that the role of physicians is not simply to preserve life but also to apply expertise and skills to help improve their patients’ health or alleviate their suffering. The latter includes providing comfort and support to dying patients. Such patients may, after careful consideration, come to the conclusion that in their particular situation, asking a physician for assistance in suicide best reflects their interests and preferences. Some patients wish to proactively shape the end of their life; to those patients, taking action to end their life is better than passively waiting for death to occur. Only a minority of persons who inquire about suicide assistance actually complete the process; this indicates that the option is perceived as a choice that can be abandoned.
Why not leave the field unregulated? We don’t legislate to regulate how doctors withdraw life-saving treatment. Doctors and family members have long made decisions about life support in the absence of laws or regulations. In palliative care wards, a patient can contract pneumonia and not be given an antibiotic because the patient believes that it’s time to go. A lot of doctors are very nervous about this. They’re not very keen on participating in an environment where a lot of the details aren’t clear. From a public safety perspective, you would want some mechanism where there is monitoring — is there a doctor who is a real outlier in his practice? Is there someone who’s pushing through 60 of these [patients] a year but he’s not a palliative care doctor? But Mr. Attaran argues that when the federal government has tried to regulate ethically sensitive matters in the past, “they’ve done an appallingly bad job of it,” he said, pointing to the now-shuttered federal agency that was struck to oversee Canada’s fertility industry. Mr. Attaran said the “dysfunctional” agency, Assisted Human Reproduction Canada, “performed next to nothing for several years before it was abolished.”
When large laws are changed or implemented there will always be resistance at first whether it be from doctors, government, or neighbouring countries; however, like most things, with time comes acceptance. When first implementing the right for physicians to assist death in Oregon, they made sure that the patient must have specific qualities before being considered. This is one of the main differences between EU countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, and Netherlands and the U.S.
The main concern was that the treatable may be killed instead of cured. To make sure of this in Oregon the patient must be terminally ill, and not willing to die due to a mental condition (i.e. depression) unlike in Switzerland,..etc. How does this reflect on Canada, and how can we stop this slippery slope one may ask. If the federal government implements a set of “ground rules” that is province wide, then each province can set certain standards and exceptions.
If this law is approved there is a secondary question perhaps just as big, who will do the euthanizing? According to a poll by the Canadian Medical Association one quarter of doctors are willing to euthanize their patient. In the realm of physician assisted suicide that is in fact a large amount. Considering that only two of every thousand people that die in Oregon is from euthanasia. There is quite a bit of mental work done on a patient before they are given the go ahead for physician assisted suicide, one of the reasons the number of deaths is so low. Another concern is that after a while doctors may not want to end patients life, and euthanasia becomes an unavailable option because of the trauma to doctors. On the other hand, that could be balanced out by the wish to help someone who is in severe pain and suffering by giving them a gift to end their life as they want it.
This article is important as it shows how Canada is preparing for legalized doctor-assisted suicide. Medical leaders are looking for clarity for how doctors should be prepared to perform this most difficult task: what is the most humane way to take away a life? Doctors need to know what drugs to use at what doses and how to administer it correctly so that they can avoid complications. Leaders of the Canadian Medical Association are turning to Europe and the states in America that have legalized doctor-hastened death as they try to figure out the right way of doing doctor-assisted suicide.
National post was created in 1998 so it is difficult to examine how trustworthy it is. Their editorial opinion is more conservative but that does not seem to affect the information in this article. This is mostly an informative article so their political opinion doesn’t get in the way of the facts.
Conclusion