Too much information?
The PR department of a hospital thought so, but patients are entitled to consider all sides of an issue such as euthanasia.
The ethics of communication – whether over-communication or under-communication – have been in the news over the last few months. WikiLeaks , the Murdoch press affair in Britain, and in Canada the public’s right to be informed of the details of the health status of the leader of the federal opposition, Jack Layton, have all made headlines. A recent incident caused me to look at the ethics that should govern communications in a very everyday context, that of hospital patients’ committees communications to patients. Here’s the story.
The patients’ committee of a teaching hospital recently held its annual dinner meeting. They invited me to be their 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.
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:
[Somerville] proposed that one question we need to explore is why now, after seeing euthanasia as ethically wrong for millennia, Quebec society would see legalizing it as a good idea? “Societies like ours have been saying for years and years that euthanasia is ethically wrong. Why would we change our minds now?” she asked. She suggested that perhaps one reason is that Quebec “has made a radical change from a profoundly religious society to a militantly secular one,” and the traditional ethical safeguards are no longer operative.
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.
Dr. Somerville spoke of the situation in the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legalized for over thirty 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.