BREAKING: Canadian gvmt panel recommends forcing Christian hospitals to euthanize patients

All publicly funded institutions – which includes Christian hospitals and nursing homes – must be forced to provide assisted suicide and euthanasia, according to recommendations of the federal parliamentary committee in its report released today.

But that “simply cannot happen and must not happen,” says Christian Elia, executive director Catholics Civil Rights League.

“It’s very simple, Catholic hospitals can never participate in an intrinsically evil act, they cannot be forced,” Elia said in a media statement . “This can never be carried out, and they can expect a fight to the bitter end.”

The all-party committee of 11 MPs and five senators was tasked with providing recommendations for drafting a law governing assisted suicide and euthanasia, after the Supreme Court struck down the existing prohibition in February 2015, a ruling that takes effect June 6, 2016.

The committee heard from about 60 witnesses and received over 100 written briefs since it was convened on January 18.
Its February 25 report contains 21 recommendations for a legislative response to what it consistently refers to as “MAID”  — medical assistance in dying.

The committee noted that “a number of witnesses argued, and the Committee also believes, that if a health care facility is publicly funded, it must provide MAID.”

It recommended that the government “work with the provinces and territories to ensure that all publicly funded health care institutions provide medical assistance in dying.”

“While it is wholly unacceptable that Catholic hospitals will be forced to participate in the intrinsically evil act,” Elia said, one slightly positive note is that to confine euthanasia and assisted suicide to publicly funded institutions means no private corporations will profit from killing vulnerable people."

The committee also recommends that healthcare workers who object to killing their patients through medical means must “at minimum…provide an effective referral.”

Elia says that “compelling the health care practitioner to set everything up, to actively participate in a referral, still compels that physician to act against their conscience,  it is not a middle ground. It is basically compulsion to participate directly” in killing a patient.

As Dr Jeffrey Blackmer of the Canadian Medical Association pointed out to the committee in his February testimony, no other jurisdiction in the world mandates that an objecting physician provide an “effective referral.”

The committee also recommends that nurses and nurse practitioners be permitted to euthanize or assist their patients to commit suicide.