Catholic After Hours explores elder abuse, assisted suicide, and the Carter case
By Christopher Radziminski
The B.C. Catholic
VANCOUVER--The Catholic After Hours group addressed the re-emerging euthanasia and assisted suicide debate when it hosted an event featuring Dr. Williard Johnston, a Vancouver physician who heads the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of B.C. The group has intervener standing in a case currently before the B.C. Supreme Court that is seeking to legalize assisted killing.
“We’re short on people who have been euthanized who are willing to testify,” Dr. Johnston suggested wryly at the Irish Heather Pub Nov. 20. He said the dangers of euthanasia and assisted suicide can be insidious.
“How do we know a patient wasn’t steered into this ‘choice’?” he asked.
Dr. Johnston focused on the vulnerability of elders, citing a November Parliamentary report which revealed that some 400,000 seniors suffer abuse each year. The report noted that financial abuse is the most common form, ranging from fraudulently signed cheques to improper use of enduring power of attorney for property.
Mickey Rooney, a 91-year-old film star, testified this year to financial abuse suffered at the hands of a relative.
Elders are also vulnerable in institutions, Dr. Johnston stated. He cited a recent suspected arson attack at an Australian long-term care facility. A nurse has been charged with several counts of murder.
Closer to home, a November series in the Toronto Star revealed that Ontario nursing home inspection reports catalogue beatings and neglect of patients by staff and, in one case, the rape of a 71-year-old portrait artist with advanced dementia.
A confluence of factors, including an aging population, elder abuse in institutions and within families, and burgeoning demands on a health care system struggling with cost containment, portends even worse abuses “once you’ve conceded that it is okay for someone to kill you, Dr. Johnston asserted.
He cited the infamous case of Barbara Wagner in Oregon, where assisted suicide is legal.
In 2008, the Oregon Health Plan declined to cover a $4,000-a-month doctor-prescribed drug for the 64-year-old, but as an alternative, would agree to cover drugs costing about $50 for a “physician-assisted death.”
A spokesman for the plan later acknowledged to ABC News that Wagner not only “received bad news, but insensitivity on top of that.”
It is the protection of the vulnerable that is excluded when proponents of euthanasia and assisted suicide frame the debate in their narrow terms of radical autonomy, stated Dr. Johnston. He gave as an example a hypothetical situation he had proposed to host Bill Good on CKNW radio.
Imagine your daughter in hospital after a terrible incident, and you cannot reach her.
“Currently you can expect the laws of Canada to be on your side. Your loved one might be surrounded by people who have another agenda and [she] might be ... steered in the direction of considering suicide for a difficult situation; but if you can’t be there to protect her, the laws of Canada are there.”
The Canadian Medical Association, Dr. Johnston noted, has an official policy against euthanasia and assisted suicide. If “permitted for competent, suffering, terminally ill patients, there may be legal challenges, based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to extend these practices to others who are not competent, suffering, or terminally ill. Such extension is the ‘slippery slope’ that many fear,” warns the association in its 2007 policy.
“Forget about the ‘slippery slope,’” Dr. Johnston contended as he alluded to the 1993 Sue Rodriguez case, “we’re already near the bottom.” In that case, Chief Justice Antonio Lamer of the Supreme Court of Canada stated in his dissenting opinion that a prohibition on assisted suicide “creates an inequality since it prevents persons physically unable to end their lives unassisted from choosing suicide when that option is in principle available to other members of the public without contravening the law.”
Dr. Johnston asked about the ramifications for those who work to prevent suicide, for example a person pulled off a bridge before he jumps. How do physicians respond, He asked, if a radicalized version of autonomy is promulgated by overturning prohibitions against euthanasia and assisted suicide? How does the country respond, with over 10 deaths a day by suicide?
Concluding his talk, Dr. Johnston observed that Parliament considered such issues as elder abuse and suicide prevention last year in Bill C-384 and resoundingly rejected euthanasia and assisted suicide by a 4-to-1 margin.
The current civil claim of Carter et al versus Attorney General of Canada is an attempt, Dr. Johnston said, to steer society in a direction it has repeatedly rejected through its elected representatives.
