Will Johnston, Mercatornet, 5 de Outubro de 2016
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:
«A few days later the husband came over with a clipboard and a
pen. He started by saying, ‘Damn government did not pass the bill.’ He asked me
to sign a form – that he needed two signatures for the doctor in Vancouver. He
stated that none of their family and friends would sign. I almost passed out!
Seriously. I told him I would not sign. He assumed that it was
on religious grounds and I said no it was experiential. He said ‘OK, then I
will ask your husband.’ I told him he had better not even bring it up!
We went on a two-day visit to the grandsons and came back on
June 7 (the designated day of the euthanasia) and his balcony was draped in
black crepe.
Several days later I bumped into him at the mailbox and he
complained that none of the neighbours had given condolences even though he
made it obvious that [his wife] had ‘passed.’ I asked him how he was and he
said that his wife had a nice last day, that she liked the walk around the
seawall.
He also told me that he felt sorry for the poor doctor because
she was so tired because she had so many euthanasias that day. He and the
boyfriend are now residing together in a big new travel coach parked elsewhere
in the same trailer park and the Mustang has become the vehicle of preference
and he sold his house. No one talks to him...»
This appears to be medical homicide as a solution to depression,
apparently facilitated by a husband with other interests.
Several weeks ago I was contacted by the wife of a young man
with a neurological disease. The man had been assured by a
euthanasia-performing doctor in Vancouver that he qualified for an assisted
suicide. He was depressed and never ventured outdoors.
At the patient's invitation I visited him in his shared room in
a dingy nursing home, a place once described to me as «a prison.» He told me
about his struggle to find a cure with massive doses of vitamins. He was less
disabled than, for instance, Walter Lawrence, who
works in Vancouver as an inspiring peer counsellor to spinal injury patients
and others.
But this patient had lost hope for the future and felt his
existence was meaningless and that death was the only solution. This
death-focused tunnel vision defines a
suicidal depression, and any able-bodied person would be given psychological
help to relieve it. This disabled man, who was nowhere near dying, was instead
killed by a Vancouver physician.
The physician's rationale for circumventing the law, reportedly
given over the phone before she met or examined the patient, was that he could
easily get bed sores and then die of infection, so that his death «was
reasonably foreseeable.»
What surprised his wife was «how easy» it was for her depressed,
self-isolated husband to be killed under the new regime. What seems obvious is
that the whole nature of this death is not going to be reported to the Minister
of Health or the Minister of Justice – there is no transparency to this system.
Five years from now, the mandatory report is going to be full of
bland and self-justifying statistics presented by the very doctors who have
done the killing. By sanitizing these medicalized suicides and homicides with
the now-familiar euphemisms about «medical aid in dying,» the uninvolved public
will be reassured that nothing has gone wrong.
Canada has simply created a system which offers, and completes,
suicide for people whose personalities, disabilities and personal situations
put them at high risk for it. Well over a hundred real people have died in
the few
months since the old law was discarded. To complain that this
was repeatedly
predicted is to
indulge in powerless understatement.
And next, we have the unfolding tragedy of palliative care. That
medical specialty has always struggled to reassure
fearful dying people that palliation has nothing to
do with «mercy killing» and assisted suicide. Reluctant families have been
truthfully promised that hospice nurses and doctors are not self-appointed
angels of death.
Sadly, palliative care wards and hospices across Canada are,
right now, in a hailstorm of administrative edicts to perform euthanasia inside
their walls, in whispering range of those families and patients who had
been promised a refuge of care.
Violating the principles and purposes of palliative care is in
no way required by the new law. The thoughtless imposition of this radical
shift needs to be halted. Hospital administrators can and must provide other
locations for those few final minutes.
Our Minister of Health and her provincial colleagues would be
wise to act quickly on this. The principles of suicide prevention have been
betrayed. It is not inevitable that the principles of palliative care must be
next.
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