Euthanasia Discussion Sparks Controversy

A Quebec hospital's decision to censor its newsletter forces us to rethink the ethics of communication.

On first publication, this article was mistakenly posted with a photograph of Montreal General Hospital (MGH). The hospital described in this article is not MGH. Dr. Somerville has not revealed the identity of the hospital described below.

The ethics of communication – both over-communication and under-communication – has been a popular topic in the news over the last few months: internationally, WikiLeaks; in Britain, the Rupert Murdoch affair; and in Canada, the public’s right to be informed of the details of the recently deceased NDP leader, Jack Layton's, health. A recent incident caused me to look at the ethics that should govern communications in a very everyday context – those pertaining to hospital patients’ committees. Here’s the story.

The patients’ committee of a teaching hospital recently held its annual dinner meeting. The group invited me to be its guest speaker, and asked me to talk about “ethics issues at the end of life […] in particular, the current debate on the controversial issue of legalizing euthanasia in Quebec.” I agreed to lead an interactive discussion, which everyone engaged in enthusiastically.

Should assisted suicide be legalized? The Mark hosts an exclusive debate here.

After the dinner, the committee secretary wrote a report of the discussion for the hospital’s e-newsletter, a copy of which she sent to me for approval, which I gave. The report, which I quote with the permission of its author and other executive members of the committee, started by saying that I am “strongly opposed” to euthanasia, which is correct. It continued:

The reasons [for current calls to legalize euthanasia], Dr. Somerville explained, lie beyond dealing with the suffering of terminally ill individuals. People have always become terminally ill, suffered, and we could kill them, so there’s nothing new there. Indeed, there is vastly more we can do now than in the past to relieve their suffering. What has changed are people’s claims to rights to autonomy and self-determination. People [claim they] have a right to control their lives and death[s].

Dr. Somerville spoke of the situation in the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legalized for over 30 years. She explained that the Dutch have expanded the criteria for allowing euthanasia and that government-sponsored studies show that there is some abuse of the practice, which could also happen here in Quebec. There are reports that some elderly Dutch people are afraid to go into their own hospitals, because they fear being euthanized and that some are crossing the border to go into the German hospitals, where, as a result of the Nazi legacy, euthanasia is rejected. “In short, euthanasia involves physicians killing their patients; it is presently the crime of murder [in Canada] and should remain such,” concluded Dr. Somerville.

This article for the e-newsletter also explained that,

[the] Patients' Committee is a group dedicated to patient advocacy with particular focus on issues that affect patients ... Patient education and advocacy issues are an important part of the committee's agenda.

From this description, it would seem that the committee strongly supports educating patients, and that it would thus be in favour of accurately reporting on educational events that it is organizes, such as the one at which I spoke. Members of the committee have made clear to me that they believe it is important that patients are informed of the issues in the euthanasia debate, as, if legalized, it could affect many of them. As the current court challenges in British Columbia to the criminal prohibition on assisted suicide show, this is not just a theoretical concern.