Canada’s Euthanasia Bill

Update from the Canadian front of the Euthanasia Wars: BILL C-14, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make related amendments to other Acts (medical assistance in dying), has been presented in the House of Commons. It is a bill that not only introduces euthanasia and assisted suicide but makes medical practitioners the agents, indeed, the only authorized agents, of these procedures. It is a bill that thus abolishes medicine as the ancient art of doing good, and only good, to the body. Certainly standard modern definitions of medicine, such as ‘the science of diagnosing, treating, or preventing disease and other damage to the body or mind’ (American Heritage Dictionary), no longer properly identify medicine where ‘medical assistance in dying’ refers not to palliative care but to deliberate killing. Simply put, medicine is no longer medicine if it includes, in its own purview, deliberate killing. So medicine is the bill’s first casualty. See more here.

Douglas Farrow is Professor of Christian Thought at McGill University and the author of Desiring a Better Country.