Catholic hospitals

Religious freedom is under assault throughout the West around what I call “do harm” medicine. With doctors now expected to abort babies, kill or mutilate sick patients, or administer harmful substances to gender dysphoric children, and otherwise toe a utilitarian, secular line in performing professional responsibilities, Hippocratic and pro-life medical professionals and institutions are imperiled.

A column in Canada’s Globe and Mail epitomizes the mindset. When a hospital run by nuns in Nova Scotia threw in the towel, the hospital was secularized. André Picard, the paper’s health columnist celebrated the closure and called for more. From, “It’s Well Past Time for Catholic Hospitals to be Secularized”:

One hundred and twenty-nine of Canada’s 1,087 hospitals are Catholic. Most refuse to perform medical assistance in dying, abortion, tubal ligation, hysterectomy, vasectomy, gender-affirming care, or provide birth control to patients, with some even denying the morning-after pill to victims of sexual assault. There are exceptions, such as cancer-related surgery that affects the reproductive system, and workarounds like bringing in “visiting” nurses to administer meds, or building MAID clinics next door.

Many long-term care homes with religious affiliations also refuse to allow MAID on their premises. These policies are offensive — and likely unconstitutional (court challenges are underway) — and particularly problematic in smaller communities like Antigonish where there is a single hospital or care home.

New York just legalized assisted suicide. Adding insult to injury, the law requires morally or religiously objecting doctors to be complicit in assisted suicides by cooperating with some of its provisions. Specifically, the Medical Aid in Dying Act requires that the “attending physician” of patients requesting assisted suicide perform specified functions before patients can be prescribed lethal substances, with no apparent opt-out in the law that I could discern for physicians who are morally or religiously opposed to such a request. These mandatory actions include examining the patient to determine whether the illness is terminal, referring the patient to a consulting doctor to approve the assisted suicide, and discussing the “potential risks associated with taking the medication” (among others), the Read More ›

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 Read More ›