Canadian doctors are helping their patients to commit suicide, the director of medical ethics and legal affairs of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) claimed.

Dr. Eike-Henner Kluge, who approves of euthanasia, explained the procedure in a recent issue of the Canadian Medical Journal (CMAJ, 1991; Vol. 144 [3].

Prescriptions

Kluge described two ways in which doctors are involved in the suicides of their patients.

Some of them write prescriptions for powerful painkillers in the knowledge that the patient will take an overdoes, “prescriptions that are appropriate (for the patient’s condition) and should last a week, except the doctor knows full well the patient will take the entire prescription at once because he wants to die….”

In other cases doctors “know a patient is hoarding medication because he wants to take an overdose, and yet takes no steps to stop him,” he said.

Promoting euthanasia

The same issue of the Journal published an article in favour of euthanasia by writer mina Gasser-Battigan.

Her article included the following bogus arguments, backed up by harrowing accounts of terminally-ill patients in excruciating pain and humiliating disablement.

“Had our dog been ill or in pain we would have taken him to the veterinarian and had him put gently to sleep.  Why do we not gently and lovingly put people to sleep in the same way?”

“Suicide, which is often a form of self-euthanasia, has a respectable history,” says Ms. Battigan.  “The suttee’ in India, ‘hara-kiri’ in Japan, and the ‘seppuku’ in China were all acceptable forms of self-execution.

Martyrdom, a form of “unnatural death,” is a great honour for Christians.  “Can Christians accept martyrdom on the one hand and reject euthanasia on the other?”

We are already making choices about who should live and who should die in instances other than euthanasia.  In a difficult childbirth, for example, “a choice must be made between saving the life of the child or the life of the mother….”  The implication is that we ought to be able to make the same kind of decisions about the terminally ill.

“Many humans degenerate mentally and physically until they become human vegetables.  In a sense, non-persons….Can we call their killing murder?”

“There seems to be a general consensus that we all have the right to live.  If this is true, then we should also have the correlative right to die.”

The Journal also notes that the CMA Committee on Ethics has been instructed to prepare a paper on euthanasia which will be considered at the 1001 CMA annual meeting.

(Adapted from International Right to Life Weekly, (No. 19, March 18, 1991)