Levi Minderhoud is a policy analyst for the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada.A recent series of stories published by the CBC criticizes religious healthcare institutions’ refusal to provide MAiD. In the process, they inadvertently tell the story of a moral world turned upside down.One article attempts to tug at the heartstrings by telling stories of patients who chose to be transferred from a religious hospital to a secular hospital to be euthanized. The CBC described how these “forced transfers” caused pain, inflicted “unnecessary distress,” and deprived “loved ones of the chance to say goodbye.” The article describes MAiD as a “right to a dignified death,” and any institution that refuses to provide it as “imposing its values” on patients.The article recounts how a patient at a Catholic hospital waited two hours for a transfer ambulance to transfer him to another hospital. The article suggested that this two-hour delay of euthanasia necessitated two years of grief therapy for the patient’s widow. The late patient’s widow opined that the need to move to another facility to receive MAiD implied that he was “a piece of garbage.”The moral perspective in this piece is incredible. In effect, any pain, distress, disruption, or delay experienced by a patient for a couple of hours is more condemnable than the intentional killing of that patient. A significant portion of our health professions, legal system, and journalism network seems to believe that the ultimate enemy in healthcare is not death. In fact, death must be provided or sped up. Instead, the real enemies are any form of suffering or inconvenience. Grief is caused not by the death of a loved one but by a delay or not being able to say goodbye. It’s not euthanasia — the deliberate killing of another person — that makes them feel like “garbage.” Making them wait a couple of hours will do the trick. It makes one wonder what people waiting a dozen hours in the ER or waiting months to see a specialist feel.The second article describes how one euthanasia practitioner, Dr. Jyothi Jayaraman, would rather resign than participate in hospital transfers for MAiD. She appealed to her “moral and ethical beliefs.” Providing euthanasia doesn’t violate those beliefs. Quite the opposite. She claims that requiring patients to be moved from one facility to another so that they can access assisted suicide violates her beliefs. She would rather euthanize the patient immediately. .Again, this is conscience turned upside down. State-recognized conscience rights exist to ensure that a person is not forced to do something that violates his or her sense of morality (e.g. not forcing pacifists to fight in a war). It is far harder to invoke conscience rights to allow someone to do something they believe they ought to do but is not permitted (e.g. allowing a MAiD provider to provide euthanasia against the government’s law or institutional policy). A final article reports on a legal challenge to a policy that allows faith-based hospitals not to provide euthanasia on their premises. The pro-euthanasia organization Dying with Dignity claims that hospitals “don’t have conscience rights.” Only individual healthcare workers do. “People have rights. Buildings do not,” they might say.But anyone who thinks of our healthcare system as just a system of buildings without rights or beliefs or morals or emotions misses the crucial part of the system: the people. The nurses, doctors, technicians, receptionists, and cleaning staff at a hospital — particularly a small or private religious hospital — aren’t just cogs in a machine. They share the mission of the hospital, a mission that is determined not by the bricks or the two-by-fours of the building, but by the people at the heart of the institution. All institutions embody the beliefs of the people who built them. Those collective convictions should be respected just as much an individual’s convictions.All of these stories illustrate how our moral world has been turned upside down. Just over a decade ago, euthanasia was a form of murder, punishable by life in prison. Our medical, legal, and moral framework viewed both suffering and death as the enemy of the good, outcomes that are never desirable. The aim was always the good life. With the legalization and expansion of MAiD, all this has changed. Rather than the right to life, people now insist on a right to death. Rather than pursuing the good life, many advocate for a good death.Religious institutions and religious individuals are among the few in the medical sector that are willing to champion the good life over a “good death.” But they are under attack on all sides by those who wish to finish turning the moral world upside down.Levi Minderhoud is a policy analyst for the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada.
