By Terry O’Neill, The B.C. Catholic
[Vancouver – Canadian Catholic News] – The B.C. chapters of the pro-assisted-suicide group Dying With Dignity Canada have launched a public-relations campaign aimed at forcing Catholic and other faith-based health-care facilities to allow patients to undergo “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) without being transferred to a secular facility.
While the campaign has taken direct aim at the life-affirming policies of Providence Health Care hospitals such as St. Paul and Holy Family, Vancouver Archbishop J. Michael Miller said he doesn’t think the pro-suicide pressure poses an immediate threat.
“It’s only ideologues who push this and they don’t have the upper hand at the moment,” he said in an interview with The B.C. Catholic. “What’s going to happen in the long run is harder for me to discern.”
The issue of what Dying With Dignity calls “forced transfers” will be on the agenda as Archbishop Miller meets next week with Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.
In launching its attack on pro-life health facilities in March, Dying With Dignity said it wanted to ensure that suicide-seekers receiving care in pro-life facilities don’t have to endure “forced transfers” to suicide-allowing facilities. “Eligible British Columbians are being denied their constitutionally protected right to access MAiD by some taxpayer funded health care facilities,” Metro Vancouver Chapter Chair Alex Muir said in a news release.
The organization alleged that British Columbians’ access to assisted suicide is being “unfairly restricted by an outdated agreement, between the provincial government and the Denominational Health Association,” of which Providence Health Care is a principal member.
The lobby group urged its supporters to flood politicians with letters claiming that patients seeking assistance in killing themselves “are forced to undergo grueling transfers,” although the organization provided no evidence to support its assertion.
Health Minister Adrian Dix has not commented on Dying With Dignity’s campaign, but he has supported the Fraser Health Authority’s order compelling all of its facilities, including the Irene Thomas Hospice operated by pro-life Delta Hospice Society, to allow assisted suicides on their premises.
The pressure to force Catholic facilities to allow assisted suicide comes as concerns are steadily mounting over the growth of euthanasia in Canada.
Under amendments passed by Parliament in March 2021, patients do not need to have a fatal or terminal condition to be eligible for medically-provided euthanasia. Rather, they may quality if they have “a grievous and irremediable medical condition” or “serious illness, disease, or disability,” even if it is not life-threatening.
The criteria are scheduled to expand in Mach 2023 to include mental illness as a sole reason for accessing assisted suicide.
The relaxing of restrictions is especially concerning to Robert Breen, executive director of the Catholic Health Association of B.C. He said in an interview he fears that an ongoing shortage of mental-health services “could have the adverse impact” of pushing more people, with mental-health issues, to opt for assisted suicide.
“I would say that, combined with the change of the law that allows mental health as the sole purpose, it just drives more people,” Breen said. “Because in a moment of despair, they may opt for MAiD.”
The province has experienced a longstanding shortage of mental-health services, he said. The introduction of euthanasia as an option “is going to appeal to people who may be in a bad state of mental health at the time.”
Writing in the National Post on May 2, columnist Sabrina Maddeaux voiced similar concerns. “A year from now, MAiD could become an option for those who can’t afford needed therapy, medications, or care in a country that’d sooner approve euthanizing the mentally ill than provide accessible treatment options.”
Shortages of medical resources and social supports are also being blamed for forcing low-income Canadians to opt for assisted suicide.
Maddeaux cited the case of a 51-year-old Ontario woman [identified in other media reports as “Sophia”] who opted for assisted suicide after failing to find an affordable apartment that was free of the cigarette smoke and chemical cleaners that aggravated her serious allergies.
Similarly, a widely noted opinion piece for The Spectator (LINK) said Canada is essentially facilitating the euthanizing of its poor.
Canadian senior research fellow at Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project and a researcher based at Nuffield College, Oxford, an Yi Zhu, wrote: “Soon enough [following the 2021 amendments], Canadians from across the country discovered that although they would otherwise prefer to live, they were too poor to improve their conditions to a degree which was acceptable.”
It’s no coincidence, wrote Zhu, that “Canada has some of the lowest social care spending of any industrialized country, palliative care is only accessible to a minority, and waiting times in the public healthcare sector can be unbearable, to the point where the same Supreme Court which legalized euthanasia declared those waiting times to be a violation of the right to life back in 2005.”
As did Maddeaux, Zhu noted the “Sophia” case. He also cited the case of another disabled woman who applied to die because, she said, she “simply cannot afford to keep on living.” Still another patient “sought euthanasia because COVID-related debt left her unable to pay for the treatment,” leaving her with unbearable chronic pain, he wrote.
Meanwhile, police in Abbotsford, B.C., are investigating the euthanasia death of a woman whose daughters say she wasn’t in an adequate state to request it.
Donna Duncan, a psychiatric nurse, died Oct. 29, 2021, after being approved for assisted suicide despite having no terminal illness.
After a car accident in 2020, Duncan was diagnosed with a concussion. She suffered constant pain and became depressed. When pandemic restrictions were imposed, her mental health declined. She stopped taking medication to deal with her mental health and went to Fraser Health to request assisted suicide.
Her daughters have started a petition titled “Change Laws for Medical Assisted Death” after trying everything they could to prevent their mother’s euthanasia death.
A joint Commons-Senate Parliamentary committee is currently reviewing the country’s euthanasia legislation, but Schadenberg does not think it will reverse the increasingly deadly slippery slope down which Canada’s assisted-suicide law is headed.
“I don’t expect much of this committee,” he said, noting that pro-euthanasia members constitute 11 of its 15 members. “It’s about the illusion that hearings are being heard.”
He predicted the committee will recommend amendments allowing euthanasia for children and euthanasia by advance-directive, in addition to cementing euthanasia availability on the grounds of mental illness.
Schadenberg said he has tried to get approval to make a presentation to the committee, but his application has not even been acknowledged. “It’s as if we don’t exist,” he said. “It’s insane.”
That may be, but Archbishop Miller said there is no reason to despair. “I do believe that, in the long run, the truth about human life – when it begins and its natural end – will prevail,” he said.
“It’s the ‘when’ I’m not so sure of. But I think we know that the Lord is risen and, in a real sense, the victory is won.”
Our hope is well-grounded, he said, “Because human dignity is ultimately so deeply engrained in human nature, it can only be discarded or tossed aside for so long before that becomes impossible. At some point, the culture of death itself will have to die.”
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