Sick Kids Hospital Toronto will
euthanize children with or without parental consent.
Alex
Schadenberg: Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
A recent
report from the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto states that they are not
only ready to do euthanasia on children but their policy states that a child
should be able to die by euthanasia without the consent or knowledge of the
parents.
According to
an article by Sharon Kirkey for Sun Media, the Hospital for Sick Children in
Toronto published their policy on euthanasia and assisted suicide as a report
in the recent Journal of Medical Ethics. According to Kirkey:
The Sick Kids’ working group says the
hospital has willing doctors who could “safely and effectively” perform
euthanasia for terminally ill youth 18 and older who meet the criteria as set
out in federal law, and that it would be “antithetical” to its philosophy of
care to have to transfer these patients to a strange and unfamiliar adult
hospital. But it is a suggestion that euthanasia might one day take place
without the involvement of parents that has provoked fresh controversy in the
assisted-death debate.
Who does the
Hospital for Sick Children believe that euthanasia can be safe and effective
for?
Kirkey
explains that the ethicists at the Children's Hospital believe that there is no
difference between killing someone and letting them die. Clearly there is a
difference between allowing a natural death and actually causing the death of a
person. By blurring clear distinctions ethicists minimize the ethical problems
associated with doctors killing their patients. Kirkey reports:
The working group said it wasn’t convinced
that there is a meaningful difference for the patient “between being consensually
assisted in dying (in the case of MAID) and being consensually allowed to die
(in the case of refusing life-sustaining interventions).”
Kirkey
explains that most Canadian provinces allow mature minors to make decisions
about their own care, including withdrawing or withholding life support. She
explains that in Ontario a minor can provide consent for treatment or
withdrawal of treatment if they understand the “reasonably foreseeable
consequences” of their decision. The Sick Kids' hospital stated that they
encourage minors to involve their families in medical decisions.
Kirkey
explains that the Hospitals for Sick Children is suggesting that children could
decide to die by euthanasia without the consent of the parents:
The draft policy argues the same rules
should apply to MAID since there is no meaningful ethical or practical
distinction from the patient’s perspective between assisted dying and other
procedures that result in the end of a life, such as palliative sedation (where
people sleep until they die) or withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining
treatments.
Kirkey
explains that the Sick Kids Hospital paper came out just ahead of the report by
The Canadian Council of Academies that will make recommendations in December
concerning the extension of euthanasia to mature minors. The same group is
examining the extension of euthanasia to cases of mental illness alone, as well
as incompetent people who requested euthanasia within an “advance directive”.
“THE NAZIS AND THEIR CRIMES
AGAINST HUMANITY”
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