On Jan. 30, the Ottawa Citizen reported that three local family physicians were refusing to prescribe birth control pills. Not so long ago, the great majority of Canadians would have responded with an amazed: “So what?”
Not so the anonymous woman who brought this story to public attention. She was incensed when, in response to her request for a birth control prescription at an Ottawa medical clinic, she was given a form letter from the attending physician explaining that while he is pleased to assist patients with natural family planning, he does not “refer for vasectomies, abortions nor prescribe the morning after pill or any artificial contraception. If you are interested in the latter, please be aware that you may approach your own family doctor or request to be seen by another physician.”
Quite so. To any freedom-loving Canadian, that was an eminently reasonable response. In Ottawa, no one can have any difficulty in finding a physician who is willing to prescribe birth control pills.
However, that straightforward option did not satisfy the aggrieved woman. She made a public spectacle out of one physician’s refusal to prescribe birth control pills, by anonymously posting his letter on a feminist website.
Still, that physician is lucky that he was not also hauled before the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Recall the plight of Scott Brockie, the evangelical Christian and owner of a print shop in Toronto, who refused on grounds of conscience to print promotional materials for the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.
The Archives could have had their materials readily printed at any number of other print shops near Brockie’s store. Instead, the gay rights organization filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which, after a lengthy investigation, succeeded in getting a court order requiring Brockie to pay the Archives’ president $3,000 in damages and to promise that he would never again refuse a similar print order.
Brockie spent a small fortune on an appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal, all to no avail. The ruling against him still stands — an affront to the historic freedoms that Canadians enjoyed before the creation of the country’s oppressive, so-called human rights commissions.
Since the Brockie case, numerous other business leaders and even the mayors of several Canadian cities have been subjected to similar human rights abuses at the hands of these commissions. In one notorious instance, the Alberta Human Rights Commission targeted Calgary Archbishop Fred Henry, who, like Brockie, was targeted for upholding the traditional teachings of Judeo-Christian morality.
Still, no human rights commission has yet dared to attack a Christian physician for refusing on grounds of conscience to prescribe birth control pills or collaborate in procuring an abortion. How long Canada’s human rights oppressors will exercise such restraint is open to question.
Meanwhile in Quebec, a solid majority of the legislature backed Bill 52 on second reading. Under the guise of ensuring medical aid in dying, this legislation would have mandated every hospital, every palliative care hospice, and most nursing homes in the province to facilitate the deliberate killing of a mentally competent adult upon request, provided only that the patient is seriously and incurably — but not necessarily terminally — ill and suffers from “constant and unbearable physical or psychological pain which cannot be relieved in a manner the person deems tolerable.”
Bill 52 also stipulates that a physician who conscientiously refuses to kill such a patient upon demand must immediately notify a medical director designated with responsibility to assign another physician to do the deed.
In a letter to the editor published in the Montreal Gazette, Douglas Farrow, Kennedy Smith Chair in Catholic Studies at McGill University, underlined the “truly demonic nature” of this bill. He observed: “Administering lethal dosages of medication, where the intended (rather than merely foreseen) effect is to end a life, is murder, just as shooting a ‘patient’ is murder, even if he or she has requested it. Hence referral of the patient for such a procedure is complicity in murder, and as such a mortal sin.”
As the descent into barbarism in Canada proceeds apace, every Canadian, inside and outside the medical profession, is faced with a fundamental question: will I collaborate with this evil? Or am I resolutely determined — come what may — to stand by the truth as God gives me to see the truth?
