I've said it before and I'll say it again, there is something very sick and sinister beyond our northern border:
In a prestigious medical journal, doctors from Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children have laid out policies and procedures for administering medically assisted death to children, including scenarios where the parents would not be informed until after the child dies.
The article appears just three months before the Canadian Council of Academies is due to report to Parliament on the medical consensus about extending voluntary euthanasia in circumstances currently forbidden by law. The Canadian Council of Academies is specifically looking at extending so-called assisted dying to patients under 18, psychiatric patients and patients who have expressed a preference for euthanasia before they were rendered incapable by Alzheimer's or some other disease.
The Sept. 21 paper written by Sick Kids doctors, administrators and ethicists was published in the British Medical Journal's J Med Ethics and backed by the University of Toronto's Joint Centre for Bioethics.
In a flowchart that outlines how a medically induced death would occur at Sick Kids, authors Carey DeMichelis, Randi Zlotnik Shaul and Adam Rapoport do not mention conversation with family or parents about how the child dies until after the death occurs in the "reflection period."
Patient confidentiality governs the decision about whether or not to include parents in a decision about an assisted death, the authors said. If capable minors under the age of 18 stipulate they don't want their parents involved, doctors and nurses must respect the patients' wishes.
Have they crossed the boundary into Lebensunwertes Leben?
Can they even see that boundary in their rear view mirror, or do they need the Webb telescope for it.
ReplyDeleteYes
ReplyDeleteAh, but Canadians love them some "free healthcare," unlike those uncouth, unwashed Rubes living in that gun-filled hell-hole to the south!
ReplyDeleteIt's almost like everything the Canadians do is knee-jerk reaction to the USA. And "progressive" Americans think that Canada is a good model to follow.
The Canadians are also much more like Europe than we are. In the Netherlands, there is talk about involuntary euthanasia (i.e. murder) of children without telling their parents until after their child is dead.
ReplyDeleteI agree and have long said that I'm amazed that we share such a long border with them but they're much more like the Europeans than they are like us.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if some of the differences between the US and Canada can be explained by our different histories. The US has had 2 major wars to define ourselves, the Revolution and the Civil War, Canada neither similar. Also, our early immigrants came from the whole world, Canada's mainly from the British Isles.
ReplyDelete(I am willing to be corrected on my Canadian history, if wrong about the wars and immigration)