A private member’s bill by a Saskatchewan MP to keep medical professionals from coerced involvement in euthanasia has the support of two Canadian academic ethicists..Bill C-230, the Protection of Freedom of Conscience Act was introduced by Saskatchewan Conservative MP Kelly Block on February 4 and awaits second reading. The bill would forbid intimidation or coercion against health care workers to directly or indirectly provide medical assistance in dying (MAiD), or to be fired or not hired for their stance..Douglas Farrow, a professor of theology and ethics at McGill University, told the Western Standard requiring doctors to perform euthanasia makes some with conscience issues leave the profession..“That takes away the doctor’s freedom. It also takes away my freedom because I can no longer find a doctor who will take a course of action compatible with my understanding of the human good and of my good. So once you’ve finished running out of the profession everybody who doesn’t agree with your view of humanity, I am left helpless,”said Farrow..“I cannot find a physician whom I can trust, when I am in danger of dying, to give me the best possible care and not to take my life for me, right? Not to simply say, ‘Well, the best thing for you is if I just bumped you off.’”.Farrow says requiring doctors to participate in euthanasia draws parallels with the Nazi era in Germany, as does compelling physicians to fall in line with authorities regarding COVID-19..“You create conditions in which dissenters cannot function, can’t be trained, can’t be given licences, can’t keep their licences. And so you end up without a body of dissent, which is what you want when you’re thinking tyrannically,” Farrow said..“If you say that people who are not willing to agree to perform a procedure which they regard to be an attack on the human being, rather than a defense or an assistance to the human, then you are saying that you don’t want conscientious resistance.”.Farrow says political control over religion or medicine is tyrannical..“People like me who don’t want to entrust their care to someone who takes life and death decisions for them, but want someone who is committed to, ‘First, do no harm’ — we won’t be able to find anybody. We will have to have medicine being practiced underground, just like religion in China, and increasingly here,” Farrow said..“This whole notion that the patient is always right, and that the doctor can park his or her conscience at the door and simply do what the patient asked and the state will pay for it — that’s death to real medicine. That’s euthanizing real medicine. And unless the doctors are independent, like the priests and pastors should be independent, you don’t have healthy medicine at all. And you should be worried about state funding of it, because the state will fund what serves the state.”.The film Logan’s Run is cited by Farrow as an extreme, fictional example of where state control of medicine can lead where euthanasia is mandated to control the size of the population and mitigate climate change..“If the state gets to decide this and doctors simply do what the state says, the doctors become executioners. People need to think about this kind of stuff; but they don’t think about it properly if they don’t recognize that without freedom of conscience, one cannot be human or live human. And so that’s the reason why it’s right there at the front end, along with religion, in our enumerated rights and freedoms,” said Farrow..Ethics professor Julie Ponesse was put on paid leave at Ontario’s Huron University College for declining the COVID-19 vaccine. Like Farrow, she believes Block’s bill is timely and right..“One of the great losses to health care in Canada — perhaps an irrecoverable loss — caused by the COVID-19 response is that it has ushered us into an era of conspicuous medicine, making health care and health care decisions a matter between citizen and state, not between patient and doctor,” Ponesse told the Western Standard..The ethicist says shifting medicine away from the doctor-patient relationship destroys the “intimate acquaintance” and trust required for quality medical care..“Good medicine requires, as a basic ingredient, careful, detailed knowledge of a patient’s history, personality, and the principles and preferences that make us who we are. These take time, care, and attention to assess, and are best done by a physician who has the trust of his or her patient, and who is able to act as a full moral agent with a robust sense of moral conscience,” Ponesse said..“Trust is not only situational but hard-earned. Again, it takes time to develop trust in our physician and knowing that this person could make a decision about our care on the basis of intimidation, bullying or coercion will inevitably erode any trust of which a patient might be capable.”.Lee Harding is a Western Standard contributor living in Saskatchewan.
