A Catholic Cardinal in Canada has urged lawmakers to respect the conscience rights of medical professionals as they debate allowing physician-assisted suicide.
In an intervention before the parliamentary committee considering the legal change, Cardinal Thomas Collins, Archbishop of Toronto, reiterated the Church’s stance on assisted suicide and euthanasia, but, acknowledging the possibility that the legislation may pass, he urged those drafting the law to recognise the moral objections of many healthcare workers and to grant them the right to refuse to participate in killing patients on conscience grounds.
“It is clear that reasonable people, with or without religious faith, can have a well-founded moral conviction in their conscience that prevents them from becoming engaged in any way in the provision of assisted suicide and euthanasia,” Cardinal Collins said. “They deserve to be respected.
“It is essential that the government ensure that effective conscience protection is given to health care providers, both institutions and individuals. They should not be forced to perform actions that go against their conscience, or to refer the action to others, since that is the moral equivalent of participating in the act itself. It is simply not right or just to say: you do not have to do what is against your conscience, but you must make sure it happens.”
The Cardinal was making his intervention on behalf of the Coalition for HealthCARE and Conscience, a newly formed umbrella group which includes the Archdiocese of Toronto, the Catholic Organisation for Life and Family; the Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada (CMDS), the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Societies, the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute, and Canadian Physicians for Life.
Cardinal Collins went on to state that rather than offering vulnerable patients a path to death as an answer to their suffering, Canada should provide a nationwide network of palliative care facilities to provide end-of-life services as a real alternative to assisted suicide.
“Our worth as a society will be measured by the support we give to the vulnerable,” he argued. “People facing illness may choose to end their lives for reasons of isolation, discouragement, loneliness or poverty, even though they may have years yet to live.
“What does it say about us as a society when the ill and vulnerable in our midst feel like burdens? Often, a plea for suicide is a cry for help. Society should respond with care and compassionate support for these vulnerable people, not with death.”
