Canada faces an assisted suicide/euthanasia legalization crisis, with lawsuits, advocacy for legalization, and Quebec poised to pass a law that not only legalizes wide-open euthanasia, but requires doctors to do the killing when the killing is going to be done.
But most Canadian doctors oppose participation in assisted suicide. From the Ottawa Citizen story:
Only one quarter of the nation’s doctors would be willing to help terminally ill patients end their lives if the practice of doctor-assisted suicide were legalized in this country, a survey by Canada’s biggest doctors’ group suggests. Just 26 per cent of doctors surveyed by the Canadian Medical Association said they would be “very or somewhat likely” to participate in doctor-assisted dying, while 54 per cent were “very or somewhat unlikely” to do so, according to a summary of the survey posted on the CMA’s website. The doctors’ group currently opposes euthanasia and doctor-hastened death.
Here’s the bottom line: Whether legal or not, no doctor should participate. Indeed, I urge doctors to put plaques in their waiting rooms declaring their offices “assisted suicide free zones.” Leave the killing to the ideologues and bottom feeders to protect the Hippocratic ethics of medicine.
P.S. For those interested, I sometimes Tweet stories I don’t blog. Check me out at @forcedexit.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exeptionalism.
