Commentary
How quickly laws that supposedly protect someone’s “right” to do something become laws that force other people to participate, whether they morally agree or not.
We’ve especially seen this with same-sex marriage. We decide that any two adults who love each other have a right to sanctify their union with government-recognized wedlock. That’s nice, we might sentimentally say. But suddenly, wedding photographers, wedding-cake bakers, florists, and even people who design personalized websites telling the stories of the two parties’ falling in love are required to bake the cake, design the website, and so forth, even when such actions violate their religious principles about the nature of marriage. The alternatives: face huge fines and civil judgments or get out of the wedding business altogether.
We’re now seeing exactly the same phenomenon with increasingly widespread physician-assisted suicide laws. Ten states and the District of Columbia have passed statutes that recognize a “right” for people, usually terminally ill people suffering intense pain, to decide if and when to end their lives with a physician’s help before natural death. Other states, including New York, have bills pending that would similarly establish such a right.
Typically such “medical aid in dying” consists of the physicians prescribing a lethal drug that the patient takes on his or her own. But the state of New Mexico, the latest jurisdiction to join the aid-in-dying trend, with a law that went into effect in June 2021, takes physician assistance a step further. Doctors with conscientious objections—who may believe, for example, that hastening death is morally wrong or that giving someone a prescription for a killer drug is tantamount to murder—are free to opt out. But there’s a catch: the New Mexico law requires them to inform their patients seeking to end their lives that they have a right to do so, and also to refer them to doctors or organizations willing to go along.
In other words, New Mexico physicians with religious or ethical objections to assisted suicide are nonetheless required to participate in assisted suicide, except at one remove. Disobeying the law can result in stiff fines and even the loss of one’s medical license.
On Dec. 14, Mark Lacy, a Christian doctor in New Mexico specializing in infectious diseases, joined by the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, sued the state on grounds that the law violates the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech and religious liberty.
“Suffering patients need care and sound medical treatment, and they must trust their physicians to care and not kill,” Lacy declared in a prepared statement. He said the New Mexico law, by compelling doctors to offer a path to a practice that violates their convictions, turns them into “mere instruments executing state mandates.”
But Lacy and the medical providers who share his objections on grounds of faith or ethics are up against a tide of progressive public opinion, especially in the establishment media, that pooh-poohs such objections as trivial. An unsigned Dec. 21 editorial in the
Albuquerque Journal, which has consistently supported the New Mexico law, asked, “How hard is it for a doctor to tell a patient, ‘I don’t believe suicide is the answer, and I can’t be part of it, but you have a right to know your options and I can refer you to another physician.’”
In 2019 a unanimous Ontario appeals court upheld a similar mandated-referral provision in Ontario’s regulations implementing Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAid) Act, passed in 2016. An earlier
court ruling said that the provision was a reasonable limit on physicians’ right to practice their religion because otherwise “equitable access” to Canada’s publicly funded health system would be “compromised or sacrificed, in a variety of circumstances, more often than not involving vulnerable members of our society.”
Furthermore, unlike the assisted-suicide laws in New Mexico and the other 10 U.S. jurisdictions, Canada’s MAiD Act doesn’t even simply cover prescribing a lethal drug to a patient. It also allows physicians, if a mentally competent patient requests it, to directly inject a lethal drug into that patient—that is, to euthanize him or her. In this respect, Canada is following the lead of seven other countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Colombia, and several Australian states. And as of
March 17, 2021, a patient need not even have a terminal illness to qualify. Any “grievous and irremediable medical condition,” such as a disability, that causes the patient “unbearable physical and mental suffering” and can’t be treated in a way the patient finds acceptable will suffice. That’s because in 2019 a Quebec judge found that the terminal-illness restriction discriminated against the non-terminal who want to avail themselves of MAiD, so the law got quickly expanded.
As of March 17, 2023, the category of “grievous and irremediable medical condition” will be expanded further to include chronic mental illnesses. But on Dec. 15, Canadian Justice Minister David Lametti
announced there would likely be a delay in implementing this latest expansion after a general outcry from psychiatrists and physicians around the country about a lack of “best practices” guidelines to help decide whether a patient is eligible. This hasn’t stopped backers of the mental-health expansion from
complaining that the delay could “prolong the deprivation of rights” for the mentally ill.
If Canada sounds as though it’s sliding down the slippery slope toward pushing large numbers of suffering people to have a doctor kill them instead of treating them or trying to alleviate their pain, it is. Horror stories already abound. One Canadian woman ended her life by assisted suicide in February after
failing to obtain housing assistance that she said would help alleviate her condition. A man with a neurodegenerative disease
testified before Parliament that nurses and a hospital medical ethicist allegedly threatened to bankrupt him with extra costs or eject him from the hospital to coerce him into killing himself.
More than 30,000 Canadians have chosen assisted death since the MAiD law went into effect, 10,000 of them in 2021 alone after the terminal-illness restriction was limited.
To paraphrase the Albuquerque Journal: How hard is it for a doctor whose religious faith or ethics tells him or her first to do no harm to point a suffering human in a direction in which “harm” in the form of quick, cheap death is exactly what the government wants? Pretty hard indeed. This is why it’s so important that physicians like Mark Lacy prevail in their efforts to persuade U.S. courts not to force them to participate in a system that’s ultimately murderous.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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