Euthanasia: learn from Canada’s mistakes
by Will Johnston, MercatorNet:
Now that doctors may kill, will people become terrified of palliative care?
The Carter decision to allow assisted suicide and euthanasia claimed that Canada could avoid abuses through careful guidelines and screening. Medically facilitated elder abuse by greedy relatives and medicalized suicide for the depressed — a grim reality where this practice is legal — were supposed to be avoidable, said the judge,because of a superior medical culture in Canada. The abuses of Belgium? Not for us.
Experience proves otherwise.
According to the new law, it will be five years before Canada’s assisted suicide and euthanasia regime has to report back to the nation. Two stories offer reasons why that report will fail to reveal those depressed patients, far from death, who are steered to suicide by others and by their untreated mental illness.
A friend, herself dealing with advanced ovarian cancer, heard from a neighbour that his wife was going to get assisted suicide. The neighbour said they would be going to a doctor in Vancouver to get this done. This baffled my friend, who had seen the woman outside her home, gardening. The husband made other comments suggesting that his wife would be dead soon. She had heart trouble.
My friend tipped off her own nurse to get community services involved and the suicidal woman’s depression began to be addressed by a nurse and social worker. This apparently able-bodied woman did not go to Vancouver right away — but she had been invited, as soon became clear.
I will let my friend’s words testify to the end of that story:
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