“We will renounce the right to be cared for in exchange for the right to be euthanized,” warned palliative care physician Dr. Patrick Vinay at a Feb. 19 news conference in Montreal sponsored by members of Physicians’ Alliance for Total Refusal of Euthanasia (PATRE). “We cannot support it.”
Doctors wish to guard the relationship of confidence they have with their patients, said Vinay, the former head of the University of Montreal’s faculty of medicine.
More than 300 physicians, most of them from Quebec, and 1,000 citizens have signed PATRE’s declaration against euthanasia found on the web site www.caringalways.com.
Quebec’s health minister has said she hopes to bring legislation before the National Assembly this spring that would introduce euthanasia as an option.
Technically, giving someone a lethal injection to cause death “is a homicide,” said orthopedic surgeon Dr. Marc Beauchamp. He stressed the responsibility doctors have in caring for vulnerable people and protecting them.
“If doctors can kill people, it’s dangerous, it endangers vulnerable people,” he said. “Killing is not care.
“Doctors will become accomplices in homicide, engaging in a criminal act according to Canada’s Criminal Code if Quebec redefines medicine to include directly inducing death,” Beauchamp said.
Dr. Catherine Ferrier challenged the confusion and misinformation surrounding euthanasia after the results of a recent poll showed 86 per cent of Quebeckers support it.
“I think they’re misinformed,” she said. “They have not been told the truth about end-of-life care; they have not been told the truth about what happens where euthanasia is legal. So they are basing their decisions on false information.”
Ferrier also challenged the view that most Quebec physicians support euthanasia or that some doctors say euthanasia is already occurring in Quebec.
“I’ve never seen a case of euthanasia in 30 years of practice,” the geriatrician said. She also said most doctors she encounters are opposed to euthanasia.
The push for euthanasia is the result of “a small group of activists manufacturing a consensus,” she said. “It’s an illusion.”
Ferrier called for better end of-life care, but admitted good palliative care is generally lacking in Quebec for all except cancer patients.
“We need to improve care. We shouldn’t start killing people,” she said.
“There’s a misconception that when you are dying from cancer, physical pain is inevitable,” she said. The number of people whose physical suffering doctors cannot relieve is “almost nil.”