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On conscience

April 13, 2015 by Andrea Mrozek 1 Comment

A great article about why denying conscience rights is wrong. And more specifically, about the ideological blinders on at the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons.

After the law passed, a Melbourne physician, morally opposed to abortion, publicly announced that he had refused to provide an abortion referral for a patient. This effectively challenged the government and medical regulator to prosecute or discipline him. They did not. The law notwithstanding, no one dared prosecute him for refusing to help a woman 19 weeks pregnant obtain an abortion because she and her husband wanted a boy, not a girl.

Photo credit: http://arpacanada.ca/

The War of Art

March 28, 2015 by Andrea Mrozek Leave a Comment

A friend passed on this fantastic little book to me, The War of Art. It’s not just about overcoming procrastination, it’s about doing what truly makes you tick.

Esquire calls it “A vital gem . . . a kick in the ass.”

And don’t we all need both (gems, and a kick in the ass) every once in a while? I highly recommend.

PS I wrote this post while procrastinating from what I was really supposed to be doing.

Kara Tippetts is dying…with dignity

March 20, 2015 by Faye Sonier 1 Comment

Kara Tippetts, the Colorado mama of four, is now in her final days. Kara Tippetts made headlines in November when she encouraged Brittany Maynard to live out her days rather than kill herself. Both women faced terminal conditions. Maynard chose assisted suicide. Tippetts chose palliative care.

After her diagnosis, Tippetts wrote two books, both of which I’ve read over the last month. She also kept her community and the world abreast of her condition and her deterioration via her blog and Facebook page. If you have time, read through some of the articles written by Tippetts, her husband and her loved ones. They are powerful and they are hopeful. They speak to the sadness of death and separation from loved ones, but they also speak of love, community, hope and shine a light on the best palliative care has to offer.

A documentary about Tippetts is in the process of being made and the trailer is here. I hope it has a powerful impact on the global debate on euthanasia and assisted suicide. I hope it influences our common understanding of the term “death with dignity”.

Tippetts didn’t chose assisted suicide, but it would be dishonest to say that this woman is not dying with dignity.

A mistake pro-lifers frequently make

March 9, 2015 by Andrea Mrozek 9 Comments

This article is excellent for understanding the vast majority of women who choose abortion and why. It is about right brain research showing how pro-choice women think about abortion, which is drastically different from that of the average pro-life activist.

When a woman faces an unplanned pregnancy, her main question is not “Is this a baby?”—with the assumed consequence that if she knows it to be so she will choose life. Women know, though often at the subconscious level, that the fetus is human, and that it will be killed by abortion. But that is the price a woman in that situation is willing to pay in her desperate struggle for what she believes to be her very survival.

I used to believe that women facing an unplanned pregnancy want to know whether their baby is a baby or not, the morality of the situation. Today I realize they generally do not. If you ask counsellors who see a lot of women facing unplanned pregnancies, they will confirm that fetal development is not something women are asking about. I believe it would be wise to recognize this as the pro-life movement, and that it would lead to better communication between those who are pro-life and those who are pro-choice if we did. The result would be the saved happy lives of women facing unplanned pregnancies, alongside the saved lives of their children.

Getting married, living common-law

February 14, 2015 by Andrea Mrozek 3 Comments

I did this little piece about the difference between living common law as a new longterm relationship norm and getting married. The comments are always fun. There’s a note on behalf of All Divorced Canadian Men telling me to stuff it, as well as the usual clever atheist drawing out the fact that Christians are Loons Who Cannot Think. Truthfully, I privately take bets on how early that remark will arrive. It makes it fun. Now the challenge for everyone else is to replace “Christian” with “Jewish” (“They are not to be trusted! They twist arguments!”) so that we all understand how clearly bigoted that kind of remark is. Tis the new normal. And if I couldn’t take it, I wouldn’t write columns.

Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day!

Loons. Beautiful creatures, symbolic of Canada, who can swim great distances under water! I quite admire them, actually

February 6, 2015

February 6, 2015 by Andrea Mrozek Leave a Comment

The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision about Canada’s laws on euthanasia/assisted suicide will be released today at 9:45 am.

I don’t think anyone is holding their breath. Father De Souza’s article in the Post is most excellent, very poignant, very worth reading:

Should the court rule tomorrow to liberalize our laws on euthanasia and suicide, we will be on the road to Belgium. There will be many assurances about all the strict guidelines and robust procedures in place around euthanasia — just as there were in 2002 when Belgium legalized it. Less than a decade down Europe’s euthanasia road, the milestones have been quickly passed: involuntary euthanasia, euthanasia for treatable mental illnesses, euthanasia for children.

Last October, when the Court heard the arguments to be decided tomorrow, I wrote that to embrace euthanasia and suicide as constitutional rights involved three revolutions in jurisprudence: i) abandoning the legal principle that every life is always a good to be protected, ii) embracing the idea that suicide is a social good, and iii) removing the particular obligation of the law to protect the weak and vulnerable. Before the juggernaut of personal autonomy those venerable principles don’t stand a chance in today’s Supreme Court.

Indeed, the price of exalting the personal autonomy of the able and influential is the removal of protections for those who have little autonomy to exercise and are easily preyed upon. We saw this clearly enough in the court’s prostitution decision, in which the justices opted for the liberty of those few high-end escorts that make such compelling figures at press conferences. If the removal of protection for the much larger number of exploited, abused and poor women driven to the streets is the price of that, so be it.

Tomorrow, we will hear positive reviews from the telegenic advocates of expanding the number of suicides and people euthanized in Canada. They will have compelling stories to tell. They will have fashionable spokesmen. We will not hear from those who have no advocates — the isolated elderly, alone with no one to speak for them, judged to be burdensome to our health system. The disabled who will now wonder if their doctors are coming with counsels of death do not have fashionable advocates. The truly weak and vulnerable, the exploited and abandoned, do not hold press conferences.

Canada got a break in 1993. Less than a decade after the Charter came into effect, a slight majority of justices thought it a bit of a stretch to create a right to suicide that none of the drafters of the Charter thought was there. Twenty years on, that reticence is now gone. The Charter becomes a tool of the powerful against the weak, much like medicine will increasingly become in the age of euthanasia and suicide. It begins tomorrow.

Since Father De Souza published this yesterday, I can add now that all this begins today.

Father Raymond de Souza

Parents: Talk to your children

February 3, 2015 by Andrea Mrozek 2 Comments

Miriam Grossman, (100 percent MD, 0 percent PC) is doing an admirable job these days to equip us all to cope with 50 Shades of Grey. I’m encouraged that she is rising to this challenge, considering I just saw a 50 Shades of Grey display at my local grocery store, felt a rising sense of despair and then did…precisely nothing. (Well, I paid for my groceries and left. That much I did. So I’m not still standing there, incapacitated. Hurray!)

Miriam Grossman, MD

Parents, however, can do more. It’s something small and important and it will build your family up. You can talk to your sons and daughters about this stuff. And tell them why it’s not normal. Then you can expand and continue the discussion into one of what you want them to know about sex. It takes a lot less (a lot less) than 50 Shades of Grey behaviour to damage a young person. The scars they accrue in their teens and twenties will be with them for a lifetime and will be shared by their future spouse, in spite of them not having a sweet clue about who or even whether they will get married one day. Them’s the breaks and yes, it is sad. The short-lived days of the “freedom” of the sexual revolution of the 60s have already turned over into a legacy of divorce, STDs, lack of intimacy, and rising porn rates.

So, parents: you have the power to prevent pain in your kids through loving and compassionate conversation. Miriam Grossman is great, and she provides links to other helpful sites like this one.

Lejeune Exhibit January 29-31, University of Ottawa

January 26, 2015 by Andrea Mrozek Leave a Comment

From a friend. An exhibit well worth attending!

You are invited to attend an exhibit about a remarkable French scientist, Jérome Lejeune, “a father of modern genetics” who in the 1960’s discovered the trisomy 21chromosome, the cause of Down syndrome. The exhibit will tell the story of the technical challenges of making the discovery in the very early days of human genetics, how the discovery led Lejeune to value and love his patients even more, and the impact his discovery and subsequent choices had on his scientific career.

The exhibit will be held at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ottawa, in the Atrium of the Roger Guindon building (451 Smyth Road, Ottawa K1N 6N5) behind the Ottawa General Hospital), from January 29 to January 31.

A discussion panel will be held on Thursday January 29 at 7pm featuring Dr. Mark Basik fro McGill University, Dr. Lise Poirier-Groulx from the University of Ottawa, and Dr. Emanuela Ferretti also from the University of Ottawa.

More background information on Lejeune can be found here.

College of Physicians, please stand up for religious minorities

January 2, 2015 by Faye Sonier 6 Comments

*Dr. Gabel is Member of Council and Past President of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. He is the chair of the College’s policy working group which issued the draft “Professional Obligations and Human Rights” policy.

Faye Sonier

Dear Dr. Marc Gabel,

I just read this article which was published in the Catholic Register. You were quoted in the piece. Here is an excerpt:

Catholic doctors who won’t perform abortions or provide abortion referrals should leave family medicine, says an official of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.

“It may well be that you would have to think about whether you can practice family medicine as it is defined in Canada and in most of the Western countries,” said Dr. Marc Gabel, chair of the college’s policy working group reviewing “Professional Obligations and Human Rights.”

The Ontario doctor’s organization released a draft policy Dec. 11 that would require all doctors to provide referrals for abortions, morning-after pills and contraception. The revised policy is in response to evolving obligations under the Ontario Human Rights Code, Gabel said.

There have been no Ontario Human Rights Tribunal decisions against doctors for failing to refer for abortion or contraception.

Gabel said there’s plenty of room for conscientious Catholics in various medical specialties, but a moral objection to abortion and contraception will put family doctors on the wrong side of human rights legislation and current professional practice.

“Medicine is an amazingly wide profession with many, many areas to practice medicine,” he said.

Yes, medicine is “an amazingly wide profession.” Thankfully, it is also a profession which attracts an “amazingly wide” array of Canadians. Of those Canadian physicians are some who share my pro-life perspective. They may refuse to refer for abortion due to their conscience, but they may also refuse to refer due to their religious beliefs (or both – we’re working out what this means under the Charter). They may be Christian, Muslim, Jewish or atheist physicians but they have an issue with abortion or contraceptives. For them, to refer for this procedure or these drugs is to be complicit in the actions and their consequences.

I am an Ontario resident. I’m a cancer survivor. I’m a mother. I have spent far more than my fair share of time in Ontario hospitals and clinics being treated by wonderful Ontario doctors.

Over the last few years, I’ve gone out of my way to work with pro-life physicians who share my perspective. I reject the notion that killing and dismembering unborn children is medicine, and I wanted to work with physicians who share my values regarding human life and human dignity. Due to the “amazingly wide” practice of medicine in Ontario, I was able to find a few, and become their patient. I am so thankful for their care.

But due to your working group’s proposed new policy, I might lose my family physicians. They will choose to practice medicine in a province that respects both their skills and their rights, rather than sacrifice their conscience or their sincerely held religious beliefs.

I’m also a human rights lawyer. The College’s reasoning for stripping physicians of their conscience and religious rights is not based on law. Your working group received a number of submissions on that point, so I’ll leave you to review them with your legal counsel. The doctors seeking to exercise their freedoms have a leg to stand on. Heck, they have Canadian and Ontario human rights law on their side.

Of great concern to me is the definition of “discrimination” which you provided when interviewed:

“We’re saying that the discrimination occurs when you are not acting in the best interest of the patient,” said Gabel. “When you are not communicating effectively or respectfully about this with the patient, when you’re not managing conflicts, when you differ from the patient and when you are not respecting the patient’s dignity and ensuring their access to care and protecting their safety. That’s the issue.”

Dr. Gabel, this is not the definition of “discrimination” at law. If someone chooses to make up definitions for words, they are free to do so. (My son, for example, seems to think that “babagaba” is a verb which means “to chew on mommy’s ankle.”)

However, for a body like the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario to create a new definition of “discrimination” which will result in the stripping of legal and human rights of some of their members is shocking, and this new definition will not stand up in a court of law. I urge the College to abide by Canadian and Ontario law.

Dr. Gabel, I suspect you are well intentioned and a kind and caring psychotherapist, like so many of the wonderful doctors who have treated me over the years. But please don’t force my physicians from the province with your policy. My family depends on their expertise and professionalism. I like to see my own values reflected in the “amazingly wide” practice of medicine in Ontario. For someone like myself, a religious minority, this is very important.

The membership of your College is broad and wide enough to include some family physicians who happen to hold pro-life positions. If it is not, it should be.

Sincerely,

Faye Sonier

A review of The Birth of the Pill

December 3, 2014 by Andrea Mrozek Leave a Comment

Great, great read:

The cardinal tenet of the Contraceptive Regime is that The Pill safely sterilizes the sexual act. As a result of this belief, we accept the idea that we can have sex with anyone we want, without regard for potential consequences. We think we can have sex with a person who would be a disaster to parent with. And when the inevitable pregnancy actually occurs, we act surprised every time. Women are then faced with the choice of becoming a single mother, having an abortion or placing the baby for adoption. None of these choices is particularly good for the child, nor in the end, for the woman.

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