Lawsuit in Canada to Force Catholic Hospitals to Permit Euthanasia

Freedom of religion is on the ropes in increasingly authoritarian Canada — despite a specific charter guarantee of “freedom of religion and conscience.” Indeed, an Ontario court ruled previously that doctors can be coerced under threat of professional discipline to perform lethal jabs or abortions against their religious beliefs and conscience objections. Why? The court ruled that the unenumerated right of patients to receive any legal procedure paid for by the government superseded the specific charter protection. If doctors don’t want to kill, the court also ruled, they can either provide an “effective referral” — meaning soliciting a doctor known to be willing to kill — or get out of medicine.

Now, in British Columbia, the family of a euthanized woman, who was forced to leave a Catholic hospital to be killed, is seeking to compel Catholic hospitals to permit euthanasia on their premises — despite it being utterly contrary to Catholic moral teaching in the medical context. From the Vancouver Sun story:

O’Neill, who was admitted to the hospital in the weeks before her death, was transferred to a hospice 25 minutes away and her parents and her friends’s testimony will include how they were denied the chance to be with her when she died because she had to be sedated for the trip.

Their goodbyes were rushed, they said, and that O’Neill was sitting on a commode covered by a blanket during their last moments with her, according to Gage’s overview.

So the desires of the individual should overcome the religious beliefs of the institution. Forcing doctors or medical institutions to participate in the intentional taking of human life is not freedom.

More:

Her parents, Gaye and Jim O’Neill, are among the plaintiffs suing Providence, the province and Vancouver Coastal Health Authority on constitutional grounds, citing Section 7, which guarantees the life, liberty and security of person, and Section 2, which protects freedom of conscience and religion, including none. The plaintiffs argue the Catholic institution should not have the right to deny a legal procedure in a building partly funded by taxpayer dollars.

Given the current tide in Canada, I predict that the court will rule against the hospital, forcing it to violate Catholic teaching, close, or turn the facility over to the government.

Lest we become too smug, the same anti-medical conscience litigation against Catholic hospitals for refusing gender change surgeries, contraception, abortions, and the like are happening here in the U.S — perhaps most notably in the case against Dominion Health in California for refusing to remove the healthy uterus of a woman who identifies subjectively as a man. Trial is pending in San Francisco, so I expect a large damage award that could destroy Catholic health care in California, which is of course what many abortion activists, right to die activists, Democrats, and bioethicists want.