The Legal Profession and Assisted Suicide

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Mar 2016

The inimitable Hamilton Spectator has been on an assisted suicide kick.  The Spectator seems to think it is a grand idea.  The Spec exhibits no understanding of the moral quagmire introduced when the Supreme Court said that a human being had a right under the Charter to assisted suicide.

The lies behind the innocuous sounding premise are plentiful in order to keep it sounding innocuous.  For example, the procedure under which "assisted" suicide takes place is identical to the procedure by which a condemned prisoner is executed.  There is nothing "assisted" about it, somebody puts the person to death by lethal injection.

Catholic institutions have moral objections to this, and want an exemption written into the law so that there is no question about the rights of moral objectors to refuse to do the procedure.

Well!  You would think that Catholic institutions were trying to deny a gay couple a wedding cake or something.  The Spec went into full bombast mode about how religion should not trump the law of all things.  Such a depth of ignorance deserved a response, and it is below.

When the Spectator complains that religious beliefs should not trump the law, it argues incoherently.  The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not a list of suggestions for lawmakers.  The Charter is the law of the Land which legislators may not transgress in the ordinary course of their lawmaking.

Section 2 (a) of the Charter is where one finds freedom of religion as a fundamental right.  (In case the Spectator has trouble finding it, freedom of the press is listed in Section 2 (b)).  Thus religious considerations are a component of the law and are not a trump of it, except in cases of unconstitutional legislation.

The point of a Catholic hospital seeking a specific exemption in a law of assisted suicide is to help lawmakers avoid doing something stupid.  Without a specific exemption in the suicide legislation, stupid or uniformed people might think that by mere legislation a Catholic institution can be co-opted into becoming Murder Inc. on behalf of the government.  An obvious and unnecessary lawsuit would be avoided if the lawmakers were to make a simple recognition of the facts of the Charter in the suicide legislation.

The Spectator’s incoherent argument does not end there.  The Spectator calls for financial sanctions against Catholic hospitals and against doctors of conscience if they refuse to join the government’s Murder Inc.  It is one thing not to pay a hospital for services it does not perform; but why fail to pay for services it does perform?  The financial penalty lies refusing the business, but to fail to pay a hospital for doing a heart surgery because it does not also do suicide cannot be justified.  Let those who do the business get rich.

Behind all this is a thoughtless arrogance of the legal profession.  A doctor educated himself on his own dime and is likely involved in what is known as “private practice.”  He is not beholden to the government.  But the legal professionals on the Supreme Court, in parliament, and in the Justice Department seem to think they can order the medical profession to join Murder Inc. or face legal sanction.

If the Hippocratic Oath means anything to the medical profession, when faced with the suicide law they ought to down tools and tell the lawyers to do the killing themselves.

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