Expert says federal MAiD guideline crosses ethical line, amounts to ‘authoritarian moral partisanship’

Also published online at the BC Catholic newspaper site this week, another of my MAiD stories:

A leading Canadian voice in the international debate on conscience rights in health care is highly critical of a Health Canada document that would compel doctors to raise the subject of euthanasia with some of their patients.

Sean Murphy, the Powell River-based administrator of the Protection of Conscience Project, wrote in a detailed analysis of Health Canada’s Model Standard Practice for MAiD that the document attempts to erase the controversy over euthanasia “by an authoritarian exercise of moral partisanship.”

Murphy zeroes in on a key part of the document that says doctors who conclude their patients might be eligible for MAiD must then ascertain whether they have a moral objection to the practice. If not, doctors must then suggest euthanasia or assisted suicide, which Murphy abbreviates as EAS, as an option.

“The Standard trades on principles of informed consent to force practitioners to suggest EAS to patients who have expressed no interest in it simply because the patient might be ‘eligible’ for it,” Murphy wrote in the analysis in July 2023, four months after Health Canada published the little-publicized Model Standard Practice.

He said the ploy is most evident in the requirement that practitioners explore patients’ views about euthanasia and assisted suicide in order to determine whether or not to present them as potential treatment options.

“The exploration itself would effectively present the procedures as options, just as a practitioner’s exploration of a patient’s views about having a sexual relationship with him could hardly fail to be understood as the presentation of an option,” Murphy wrote.

The B.C. Catholic reported last month that several Canadian doctors who oppose euthanasia were sounding the alarm about the Health Canada standard on similar grounds.

Health Canada has no authority to direct provinces or health authorities to adopt the guidelines, and a limited review by The B.C. Catholic found no evidence that any public agency or professional body in B.C. had done so.

Nevertheless, the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers believes medical practitioners should initiate MAiD discussions. In fact, a document on its website asserts that clinicians “have a professional duty” to do so.

This might help explain why there have been so many news reports of doctors initiating MAiD discussions, even to the point of patients saying they felt pestered about euthanasia.

Murphy also alleged that, while the Standard Model Practice acknowledges ethical norms espoused by the Canadian Medical Association and other professional groups, “its demand for effective referral contradicts the longstanding position of the CMA and its current policy on EAS.”

Murphy’s analysis also says the standard does not make it clear that inidividuals cannot be be compelled under any circumstances to assist in providing MAiD.

“The absence of such a statement indicates that Canada’s national government supports coercion of unwilling health care workers to force them to assist in killing their patients,” he wrote. “Provincial governments and professional regulators should clearly reject this position by prohibiting coerced participation in EAS.”

Murphy, a member of Church of the Assumption Parish in Powell River, is an associate of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and a former director of the Catholic Civil Rights League.