Science Canada explores euthanizing children without parental consent - Because those kids won't off themselves!

https://beta.ctvnews.ca/national/health/2018/10/12/1_4132078.amp.html

Canada’s largest pediatric hospital is grappling with how to approach assisted dying in a new paper that has received criticism from some international groups that oppose euthanasia.

Published online in a Sept. 21 paper in the BMJ's Journal of Medical Ethics, a team at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children outlined a draft policy for responding to a request for medical assistance in dying (MAID) from an adult patient. The policy assessed their eligibility, looked at reflection period with the patient and family, and ultimately administering the procedure. The policy does not address children.

The new paper comes a few months ahead of an expected report by the Canadian Council of Academies, which was tasked by the federal government to produce a two-year research paper about circumstances prohibited by MAID law, including assisted dying for minors. Bill C-14 was passed in Jun 2016 and legalized medically assisted dying in Canada.

The Sickkids report has stirred some international attention from conservative publications like the National Review, which published a story earlier this month with the headline “Child Euthanasia without Parent Approval Pushed for (in) Canada.” Others have concluded that the new policy suggests parents might not be informed until after the child dies in some scenarios.

Co-author Adam Rapoport said that is simply not true.

“Those articles that have made it sound like we would do this without parental knowledge -- that’s just not how we operate as an organization,” he said in a phone interview with CTVNews.ca. “To think that we would ever do that -- I couldn’t even imagine the circumstance.”

Rapoport, the medical director of the Paediatric Advanced Care Team, stressed that the policy is not for minors. MAID is currently only legal for adults. The policy is in draft form and has not been approved by the hospital.

But the statement that the policy was developed “with an eye to a future when MAID may well become accessible to capable minors” has been the primary focus for some readers. In Ontario, “capable young people can and do make the decision to refuse or discontinue life-sustaining treatment,” the Sickkids paper states. If medically assisted death is legalized for patients under 18, the hospital would face increased ethical dilemmas.

Tom Koch, a consultant in chronic and palliative care in Toronto, told CTVNews.ca that the paper is a “good faith effort by the hospital to find a way through the ethical, legal, and moral tangle that is facing hospitals, hospices, and other facilities.”

“There is pressure for the expansion of medical termination (MAID) into more and more situations where physicians are understandably cautious about it as the only or best alternative,” he said. But Koch has “severe reservations” about children’s hospitals administering MAID, which he believes should be more bluntly called “medical termination.” He is skeptical whether a “capacitated” minor can make a truly informed decision, referencing incidents where children have made medical calls that clearly reflect their parents’ point of view.

“I think that while legally competent, many adolescents, and especially pre-teens, can not legitimately make a call for their own termination,” he said in an email sent to CTVNews.ca.

Rapoport thinks the skepticism is reasonable, but notes the hospital will “err on the side of caution” when a child’s capabilities are uncertain.

“These are things we engage in not infrequently. We’re regularly assessing the capability and capacity of young people to make serious medical decisions sometimes which involve end of life issues,” he said. “It is something that we think we do well.”

Scientific paper found here.
References to the Council of Canadian Academics regarding euthanasia, here.

 

[repentance]

It’s more that they simply wouldn’t use medical resources to delay the inevitable.

No, the discussion paper is about medically assisted euthanasia - which requires deliberate action hasten death beyond merely withdrawing care (passive euthanasia)

 

[RG 448]

No, the discussion paper is about medically assisted euthanasia - which requires deliberate action hasten death beyond merely withdrawing care (passive euthanasia)

Correct. I meant to imply that they conserve resourses by hastening death. I apologize for not being clearer.

 

[Koby_Fish]

Slippery slope was never a fallacy, it was invented by a butthurt philosopher who didn't understand the concept of precedents

Well, there's a valid slippery slope, and then there's the slippery slope argument-fallacy. The difference being, in the fallacy, the person argues that something way out of left field will come to pass somewhere down the road that couldn't in any reality ever actually happen, if the metaphorical domino one is arguing over in the present is tipped over.

 

[QI 541]

Well, there's a valid slippery slope, and then there's the slippery slope argument-fallacy. The difference being, in the fallacy, the person argues that something way out of left field will come to pass somewhere down the road that couldn't in any reality ever actually happen, if the metaphorical domino one is arguing over in the present is tipped over.

If "The logic isn't a fallacy this time because I think I have a really good reason" then it isn't a fallacy. Other fallacies are still fallacies regardless of whether their conclusion is right or wrong, and everyone who uses the slippery slope argument thinks there's some kind of logical connection between the two events.

 

[repentance]

Correct. I meant to imply that they conserve resourses by hastening death. I apologize for not being clearer.

Futile care is a complex issue. Even physicians themselves often can't agree on what constitutes futile care, when it's justifiable and for how long. A lot of experimental medicine starts out as futile care. When those treatments eventually become mainstream, it's difficult to argue that resources were "wasted" on providing that care to the patients along the way who had little hope of deriving any benefit from them.

Medical research depends on there always being a group of patients desperate enough to "try anything" and research doctors are often quite aggressive in pushing patients towards trials even when there's a good chance that suffering will only be prolonged, increased, or both.

I come across a new paper related to these difficult ethical issues every couple of months, and doctors themselves are out there publishing them for public consumption, but I don't think that we can ever arrive at good public policy without a much more engaged and informed public.

 

[RG 448]

Futile care is a complex issue. Even physicians themselves often can't agree on what constitutes futile care, when it's justifiable and for how long.

It should be determined based on how quickly the patient can recover and how productive they will be upon recovery. Broken bones, for instance, can take months of recovery and in most cases the patient is replaceable in their workplace, meaning it might be more efficient to simply cut the fat and move on, so to speak.

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

Their ethnocentricity, hereditary deviancy and undisguised contempt for the people, traditions and values of their host nations should disqualify them.

I keep hearing this, and yet: I'm a kraut that hangs out with a lot of Jews (like, being invited to Bar Mitzvahs and shit), and I've never seen these secret evil tendencies "da joos" supposedly have ever manifest (certainly not to the degree I've seen it manifest in, say, many of the goyim I work with). I guess they all just secretly hide it from the goyim at all times using their goy-detecting radar.

 

[Vorhtbame]

It should be determined based on how quickly the patient can recover and how productive they will be upon recovery. Broken bones, for instance, can take months of recovery and in most cases the patient is replaceable in their workplace, meaning it might be more efficient to simply cut the fat and move on, so to speak.

Now see, you were doing so well with your trolling until this right here. You just went one too far.

 

[RodgerDodger]

So the Canadian Government plans to just round kids up and put them down like stray dogs? Wasn't that the plot for a number of classic Disney Live Action movies and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? I vaguely remember Dick Vsn Dyke may have been in some way involved?

Futile care is a complex issue. Even physicians themselves often can't agree on what constitutes futile care, when it's justifiable and for how long. A

The best argument I ever heard regarding this. "How many books did Stephen Hawking write while in a technical state of "Futile Care"?"

 

[RG 448]

Now see, you were doing so well with your trolling until this right here. You just went one too far.

I’m not sure I follow. Do broken bones heal faster than I thought?

 

[Computery Guy]

Now see, you were doing so well with your trolling until this right here. You just went one too far.

It was one hell of a Troll Tightrope Act though. Even had me going for a second for the first few posts!

 

[ロボ﹏§¤r﹏h¶rœ]

Canadian Hospice to Be Shuttered for Refusing Euthanasia ​

I have written here before about Delta Hospice in British Columbia, which has been under unremitting pressure by the government of the province — including a funding cutoff — only because it refuses to participate in euthanasia. It is now being forced to lay off clinical workers and faces eviction. From the press release:

The board of DHS deeply regrets being compelled to take this action. Tragically, as the video and the attached background document make clear, we have been left no other choice due to the Fraser Health Authority canceling our service agreement and 35-year lease. Fraser Health is about to evict us and expropriate approximately $15 million of our assets simply because we decline to euthanize our patients at our 10-bed Irene Thomas Hospice in Ladner, B.C.

To be clear, we accept that the provision of MAiD is an elective, legal service across Canada.Nothing in Canadian law, however, requires medically assisted death to be made available everywhere, at all times, to everyone. The Constitution of our private Society and our commitment to palliative care, bars us from offering it. Neither the board of the DHS, nor the vast majority of our patients and members want to change that.

Euthanasia — killing patients — is directly antithetical to the hospice philosophy as established by the modern movement’s founder, the late Dame Cecily Saunders. Indeed, when I interviewed her for my book, Culture of Death, she told me that assisted suicide denies the intrinsic equal dignity of terminally ill patients.

Not only that, but there is a hospital directly next door to Delta where patients can go to be lethally injected, so it isn’t as if suicidal patients won’t be able to obtain their desire to be made dead.

But that isn’t the problem. Delta’s stand sends the moral message that human life has intrinsic value and that medicalized killing is wrong. We can’t have that. The culture of death brooks no dissent.

 

[thismanlies]

Canadian Hospice to Be Shuttered for Refusing Euthanasia ​

You either stand up for what you believe in and lose everything. Or you murder people at the pleasure of some faceless bureaucrat.

 

[muh_moobs]

Tbh the decision of whether or not to kill a patient should always be left with the doctor. He’s the one who went to school for it, after all. The fact that a dumbass parent or snot-nosed little brat has the same input over treatment options as the doctor is insulting and really makes no logical sense.

We tried that once. The doctor's name was Joseph Mengele.

if someone's quality and quantity of life is so bad that they're barely being kept alive, then i don't see the problem with pulling the plug when parents are so irresponsible they will allow their child to suffer. I mean even in the quoted portion, its discussing the child's right to be euthanized without parental consent. If a kid's in that position, where they are in such grueling agony but have a hysterical soccermom clinging to the bedside, let the kid escape.

This is a Trojan Horse to allow the government to do whatever it wants to your children without your knowledge.

"Oh, Bobby is the right blood type to give Suzy a kidney? Just wait a few hours."

"If this black boy doesn't receive a new heart soon, he'll die! What, there's a white kid with a scraped knee down the hall? Well, we don't need any more racists, anyways!"