Faye Sonier
See my piece over at The Cardus Daily. What can we expect now that we’ve decriminalized euthanasia and assisted suicide? In short, there’s a serious risk of cuts to palliative care funding, we’ll see an increase in the rates of suicide (assisted and unassisted), and euthanasia will be performed without “explicit patient consent.”
If our healthcare systems have an inexpensive and quick intervention option compared to a more expensive and time-consuming option like palliative care, an already overburdened healthcare system will likely gravitate towards the former. In Switzerland, after Geneva’s University Hospital decided to permit assisted suicide in extreme circumstances, the hospital’s community-based palliative care service was discontinued, and the number of palliative care physicians the hospital employed was also cut.
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